Massive open online course (MOOC) completion rates hover around 7 percent worldwide, and beyond stringing criticism from MOOC skeptics in higher education, there’s not much documentation for why so few students complete the classes.
Open Culture, a website documenting the growth of MOOCs, recently published a list of the most common reasons for dropping out of MOOCs before the courses were finished, revealing a few telling tidbits about potential shortcomings for MOOC providers.
Katy Jordan, an Open University doctoral student who conducted research into web-based academic social networks, said in May that her examination of 29 MOOC platforms showed that only 7 percent of people who signed up for courses actually completed those courses.
The highest completion rate found in Jordan’s research was from a Swiss-based course in which 19 percent of students finished the class.
As Open Culture pointed out in their compiling of the top-10 reasons students dropped out of MOOCs, “the completion rates aren’t so much a problem for you; they’re more a problem for the MOOC providers and their business models.”
1) Completing MOOCs takes too much time: Many respondents said watching online lectures and completing homework assignments was simply too much to incorporate into their schedules.
2) MOOCs assume students are well informed: Many complaints centered around an assumed “knowledge base” that was often essential to understanding the course material.
3) Some MOOCs were too easy: Students found these MOOCs lacking in challenging material, with some literature courses feeling “like a glorified book club.”
See Page 2 for the rest of the Top 10…
- Enflux Launches Curriculum Intelligence for Health Professions Education - October 5, 2026
- AACTE releases national framework on AI in educator preparation - September 14, 2026
- Student coaching can help thousands of HBCU students re-enroll and graduate - August 21, 2026