MOOC Interrupted: Top 10 Reasons Our Readers Didn’t Finish a Massive Open Online Course

mooc completion

On Tues­day, we gave you a Visu­al­iza­tion of the Big Prob­lem for MOOCs, which comes down to this: low com­ple­tion rates. To be clear, the com­ple­tion rates aren’t so much a prob­lem for you; they’re more a prob­lem for the MOOC providers and their busi­ness mod­els. But let’s not get bogged down in that. We end­ed our post by ask­ing you to share your own expe­ri­ence with MOOCs — par­tic­u­lar­ly, to tell us why you start­ed and stopped a MOOC. We got close to 50 thought­ful respons­es. And below we’ve sum­ma­rized the 10 most com­mon­ly-cit­ed rea­sons. Here they are:

1.) Takes Too Much Time: Some­times you enroll in a MOOC, only to dis­cov­er that it takes way too much time. “Just didn’t have time to do all the work.” “As a full-time work­ing adult, I found it exceed­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to watch hours upon hours of video lec­tures.” That’s a refrain we heard again and again.

2.) Assumes Too Much Knowl­edge: Oth­er times you enroll in a MOOC, only to find that it requires too much base knowl­edge, like a knowl­edge of advanced math­e­mat­ics. That makes the course an instant non-starter. So you opt out. Sim­ple as that.

3.) Too Basic, Not Real­ly at the Lev­el of Stan­ford, Oxford and MIT: On the flip side, some say that their MOOCs weren’t real­ly oper­at­ing on a seri­ous uni­ver­si­ty lev­el. The course­work was too easy, the work­load and assign­ments weren’t high enough. A lit­er­a­ture course felt more like a glo­ri­fied book club. In short, the cours­es weren’t the real uni­ver­si­ty deal.

4.) Lec­ture Fatigue: MOOCs often rely on for­mal video lec­tures, which, for many of you, is an“obsolete and inef­fi­cient for­mat.” And they’re just some­times bor­ing. MOOCs would be bet­ter served if they relied more heav­i­ly on inter­ac­tive forms of ped­a­gogy. Val put it well when she said, “We should not try to bring a brick and mor­tar lec­ture to your liv­ing room. Use the resources avail­able and make the learn­ing engag­ing with short­er seg­ments.… The goal should be to teach and teach bet­ter. If one of these online uni­ver­si­ties can fig­ure that out, then the mon­ey will fol­low.”

5.) Poor Course Design: You signed up for a MOOC and did­n’t know how to get going. One stu­dent relat­ed his expe­ri­ence: “From day one I had no idea what I was sup­posed to do. There were instruc­tions all over the place. Groups to join with phan­tom mem­bers that nev­er com­ment­ed or inter­act­ed, and a syl­labus that was being revised as the course went through it’s first week.”

6.) Clunky Community/Communication Tools: This has been the Achilles’ heel of online learn­ing for years, and so far the MOOCs haven’t quite fig­ured it out. It’s not unusu­al to hear this kind of com­ment from stu­dents: “I find that the dis­cus­sion forums aren’t very use­ful or engag­ing. They are not a very good sub­sti­tute for active in-class dis­cus­sion.”

7.) Bad Peer Review & Trolls: Because MOOCs are so big, you often don’t get feed­back from the pro­fes­sor. Instead you get it from algo­rithms and peers. And some­times the peers can be less than con­struc­tive. One read­er writes: “I chose to stop doing the peer response sec­tion of the class due to some stu­dents being treat­ed rude­ly [by oth­er stu­dents]; in fact, the entire peer response sec­tion of the class is done in a way I would NEVER have asked of stu­dents in a class­room.… [T]here is no involve­ment of the pro­fes­sor or TA’s in mon­i­tor­ing the TORRENT of com­plaints about peer reviews.”

8.) Sur­prised by Hid­den Costs: Some­times you dis­cov­er that free MOOCs aren’t exact­ly free. They have hid­den costs. Brooke dropped her MOOC when she real­ized that the read­ings were from the pro­fes­sor’s expen­sive text­book.

9.) You’re Just Shop­ping Around: You shop for cours­es, which involves reg­is­ter­ing for many cours­es, keep­ing some, and drop­ping oth­ers. That inflates the low com­ple­tion rate, but it gives you free­dom. As one read­er said, “I am very, very hap­py about being able to be so picky.”

10.) You’re There to Learn, Not for the Cre­den­tial at the End: Some­times you do every­thing (watch the videos, do the read­ings, etc.) but take the final exam. In a cer­tain way, you’re audit­ing, which suits many of you just fine. It’s pre­cise­ly what you want to do. But that, too, makes the low com­ple­tion rates look worse than they maybe are.

Thanks to every­one who took the time to par­tic­i­pate. We real­ly appre­ci­ate it! And if you’re look­ing for a new MOOC, don’t miss our list, 300 Free MOOCs from Great Uni­ver­si­ties (Many Offer­ing Cer­tifi­cates).


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Comments (14)
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  • Hal DuBois says:

    The first thing that grabbed me is that I was one of the folks who dropped the Duke class! It’s been the only class­es I’ve dropped on Cours­era, but all the rea­sons or pres­sures you’ve list­ed are fac­tors in how I look at my lim­it­ed (about 8) expe­ri­ences. Many of these cours­es are first time offer­ings. Per­haps they’ll be a “mooca­men­da­tion” sys­tem (tuned to user demo­graph­ics and moti­va­tions) that will start fil­ter­ing out some of the false starts. I also think it would be help­ful to spilt the list, with fac­tors com­mon to course­work in any form on one side (invit­ing com­par­i­son) and prob­lems, most­ly tech relat­ed I sus­pect, unique to MOOCs on the oth­er.

  • david says:

    It’s all about the qual­i­ty of the lec­tur­er. Once you lis­ten to Steven Smith at Yale on polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy or Leo Strauss on Niet­zsche, it’s hard to accept less insight for your time.

  • Pearl Klein says:

    I’m real­ly sur­prised by #6. Though I have no direct expe­ri­ence with MOOCs, peo­ple in my fam­i­ly have spent thou­sands of hours ded­i­cat­ed to chat­ting online about top­ics of great inter­est to them. Per­haps the design is too com­plex, and needs to be more like Red­dit…

  • Daryl Lunsford says:

    I left a MOOC after about 3 weeks. When they were launch­ing it, they set the video lec­tures up improp­er­ly, and no one could access them. That threw every­one enrolled behind almost 2 weeks, but it was announced that no cor­rec­tion to the term sched­ule would be made, mean­ing that you had to do the same amount of work in less time. The course was in sec­tions, each with a test that had to be passed before mov­ing on, but ques­tions in the tests were on sub­ject mat­ter that had­n’t been cov­ered at all in the lec­tures. This was a math MOOC that I was tak­ing to bet­ter pre­pare me for some math cours­es I was going to have to take in my online degree pro­gram, but it was pret­ty much a waste of time.

  • TJW says:

    I don’t know what all the com­plain­ing is about with FREE MOOCs.

    In a typ­i­cal col­lege set­ting, there are good and bad pro­fes­sors, cours­es that are worth every pen­ny, some that aren’t worth a dime. I think peo­ple should quit com­plain­ing and be grate­ful that col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties are will­ing to edu­cate you for free or at a cost MUCH LESS than what’s offered in a typ­i­cal col­lege set­ting.

    Don’t like a course, drop it. What’s the big deal?

    Why would any­one give you some­thing for free if all peo­ple do is com­plain?
    Not a very intel­li­gent thing to do if you ask me. I hope these idio** don’t ruin it for every­one.

  • RalfLippold says:

    Fol­low­ing a MOOC is a chal­lenge of itself. Show­ing every­one involved that learn­ing with oth­ers is not an easy thing.

    What held me back late­ly to fol­low “Learn­ing Cre­ative Learn­ing” was the immense spread­ing of var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and par­tic­i­pa­tion chan­nels. Based here in Ger­many, with a time dif­fer­ence of six hours to MIT, and a cul­ture of taking/watching a course when it is “on” made it almost impos­si­ble to get in con­tact with locals. Anoth­er not to under­es­ti­mate rea­son is that the cours­es are in Eng­lish most­ly (no issue for me) and espe­cial­ly in cen­tral Europe, includ­ing Ger­many, Eng­lish is still a major hur­dle for larg­er, and longer involve­ment.

    How­ev­er I see ways to improve­ment, like col­lab­o­ra­tion with uni­ver­si­ties, and embed­ding some of the MOOC mate­r­i­al into local cours­es, and make it manda­to­ry to take them in order to gain cred­it points in your stud­ies (in case you are a stu­dent), or oth­er incen­tives which could go to employ­ees, or unem­ployed peo­ple.

    Look­ing for­ward to read­ing more thoughts on it.

  • Hugh says:

    I’m cur­rent­ly spend­ing a year doing an MSc full-time, pay­ing fees and incur­ring costs by not work­ing at a very good uni­ver­si­ty.

    If it had been a MOOC I would have hap­pi­ly dropped it in the first cou­ple of months as much of the teach­ing is dire and the course con­tent is very dis­ap­point­ing. Unfor­tu­nate­ly I’m com­mit­ted, and instead of drop­ping it and get­ting on with life hav­ing to see the damn thing through to the end.

    Bot­tom line: being able to drop out eas­i­ly is a fan­tas­tic fea­ture of which I am very, very envi­ous.

  • Erik Keller says:

    Count me in for 10 (just brush­ing up) and (in one instance) for 1. I’m assist­ing peo­ple cre­at­ing MOOCs so I don’t have the time to fin­ish one. ;-)

  • Meredyth says:

    An issue that is not yet men­tioned is how angry and per­sis­tent the com­plaints are by some stu­dents when they are on-line. There is more anger and abuse in com­ments post­ed in the fora for on-line cours­es than observed in face-to-face cours­es. Whether this is because peo­ple feel safer and more dis­tant from the effect of their post­ed com­ments or whether the injus­tice done to them is more harm­ful, I don’t know.

    The mech­a­nism of the on-line course does not encour­age peo­ple to behave well. They encour­age a grad for atten­tion, even through noto­ri­ety. Cours­es that include par­tic­i­pa­tion in discussion/participation in the assess­ment cri­te­ria seem to exac­er­bate immod­er­ate behav­iours.

  • Meredyth says:

    An issue that is not yet men­tioned is how angry and per­sis­tent the com­plaints are by some stu­dents when they are on-line. There is more anger and abuse in com­ments post­ed in the fora for on-line cours­es than observed in face-to-face cours­es. Whether this is because peo­ple feel safer and more dis­tant from the effect of their post­ed com­ments or whether the injus­tice done to them is more harm­ful, I don’t know.

    The mech­a­nism of the on-line course does not encour­age peo­ple to behave well. They encour­age a grad for atten­tion, even through noto­ri­ety. Cours­es that include par­tic­i­pa­tion in discussion/participation in the assess­ment cri­te­ria seem to exac­er­bate immod­er­ate behav­iors.

  • BDG says:

    I just fin­ished an online course and a uni­ver­si­ty course simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, on the same top­ic.
    I joined an online course because the uni­ver­si­ty course was dia­bol­i­cal. The teacher did­n’t even com­mu­ni­cate basic infor­ma­tion, and half way through the course I still did­n’t even under­stand WHAT the top­ic was. At the final exam I only com­plet­ed half the ques­tions because I guessed most, and the rest I had nev­er even heard of. It was­n’t just me either, every­one else had the same result. I learned much more from the online course, for FREE!
    I would have so glad­ly dropped the uni­ver­si­ty course in the first few weeks if I had­n’t spent $1G+ and need­ed course cred­it. Low drop-out rates just mean peo­ple are des­per­ate not to waste their invest­ment.
    Free online cours­es mean you can kick the tires, take if for a short spin, leave it and take anoth­er, fail and try again, or even com­plete it if you want. Does­n’t mat­ter. It’s free.

  • Carl says:

    Hi. I have com­plet­ed two great MOOC cours­es recent­ly. They were both MIT space relat­ed cours­es and I real­ly enjoyed them. But that does not mean that all moocs are great. For exam­ple, in my recent expe­ri­ence I enrolled on a Maths course and there was to my mind quite a bit of incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty between what was being pro­mot­ed and what was being taught right from the get go. Every­thing was absolute­ly ‘rushed..the videos were rushed, the con­cepts were rushed, expla­na­tions were fast and shal­low and almost every solu­tion was par­tial as opposed to complete.And of course, the bain of it all, as was men­tioned in ear­li­er comments,was that the maths course imme­di­ate­ly taught from a lev­el far in advance of the lev­el that I was expect­ing to be taught at, at least in the begin­ning, and this real­ly real­ly put me off! I’m still search­ing for a maths course that has the abil­i­ty to ‘teach’ me a ful­ly worked out solu­tion to a prob­lem from A to Z so that I can sit back and say to myself ‘I under­stand’. At the moment the maths cours­es I ‘expe­ri­enced’ were teach­ing advanced con­cepts in 5 minute video sound­bites and then pour­ing ten com­plex equa­tions on to my head! And this prob­a­bly just a few hours after I had enrolled! I’ll prob­a­bly end up hir­ing a per­son­al tutor to sup­ple­ment my next maths course.

  • Carl says:

    Exact­ly! As I say, there are some great cours­es out there, and some of the tutors are fan­tas­tic!

  • Carl says:

    If you read the com­ments prop­er­ly most of the gripes are not about pro­fes­sors at all, but more about poor and slip­shod course organ­i­sa­tion and pre­sen­ta­tion of the cours­es. I’m sure every­body who has passed a com­ment here (includ­ing myself) great­ly appre­ci­ates the fact that we have free access to moocs courses.Indeed, I recall on one moocs course a stu­dent com­plain­ing about some admin error in the course. He was thanked by the course mod­er­a­tor for his com­ments because they would help to make the course bet­ter in the future.Regards…

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