More than three-quarters of students enrolled in the MOOCs were balancing school work with jobs, the university said.
And these demographics characterize many forms of online learning, not just MOOCs.
While the majority of “traditional” students on college campuses are in their late teens and early twenties, those taking online courses tend be adult learners with families and jobs.
The average age of students at the online-only Western Governors University, for example, is 36. A 2012 survey of online courses, sponsored by the Learning House and Aslanian Market Research, found that the average entirely-online student is 33 years old and fully employed.
“This difference in the nature of the student body confounds direction comparisons,” the authors of the Babson survey wrote. “If students are more likely to drop out of an online course because of work or family commitments, does that reflect on the nature of the course, or the nature of the student?”
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