Data mining exposes embarrassing problems for massive open online courses


It wasn’t so long ago that the excitement surrounding online education reached fever pitch, MIT Technology Review reports. Various researchers offering free online versions of their university classes found they could attract vast audiences of high quality students from all over the world.

The obvious next step was to offer far more of these online classes.

That started a rapid trend and various organisations sprung up to offer online versions of university-level  courses that anyone with an internet connection could sign up for. The highest profile of these are organisations such as Coursera, Udacity and edX.

But this new golden age of education has rapidly lost its lustre. Earlier this month, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania reported that the online classes it offered had failed miserably. Only about half of the students who registered ever viewed a lecture and only 4 per cent completed a course.

That’s prompted some soul searching among those who have championed this brave new world of education. The questions that urgently need answering are: what’s gone wrong and how can it be fixed?

Today, Christopher Brinton at Princeton University and a few pals offer their view. These guys have studied the behaviour in online discussion forums of over 100,000 students taking massive open online courses (or MOOCs).

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