Measuring the Success of Online Education

By John Markoff. One of the dirty secrets about MOOCs — massive open online courses — is that they are not very effective, at least if you measure effectiveness in terms of completion rates.
If as few as 20 percent of students finishing an online course is considered a wild success and 10 percent and lower is standard, then it would appear that MOOCs are still more of a hobby than a viable alternative to traditional classroom education. Backers reason that the law of large numbers argues in favor of the online courses that have rapidly come to be seen as the vehicle for the Internet’s next big disruption — colleges. If 100,000 students take a free online course and only 5,000 complete it, that is still a significant number. However, MOOCs are a moving target. Because they are computerized and networked they offer an ideal medium for quantifying what works and what doesn’t. Earlier this week, when San Jose State University in California announced that it was contracting with MOOC-developer Udacity to create three pilot classes, they noted that the National Science Foundation had agreed to fund research to study the impact of the classes. Read more...