Why Can’t I Finish My MOOC?

I know you didn’t complete yours either

Only 7% of the people who start a MOOC (a Massively Open Online Course), end up finishing it.

This 7% doesn't comprise of your average student. Or the unemployed. Or the part time worker.

This 7% comprises of educators and post graduate degree holders. That’s right. Professors, lecturers, and four-year degree holders.

MOOCs were created as open source education portals. The objective was to make education available to every person across the globe. But that purpose isn't exactly getting solved here. The idea is great, but the implementation needs tweaking.
I decided to look at it from a student’s point of view.

What was I really missing? Why could I not complete the creative thinking and logical argument courses that I’d picked up? I am a good student, I am passionate about learning and I can comparatively persist.

I figured that I found Khan Academy better. In fact when I ran it by my class, all the students looking for guidance on financial derivatives picked it up immediately. That’s when the missing link got clear to me. The MOOCs ( Coursera, Udacity ) were too long while what we needed were doses of learning. The concept followed through when I tried GA (General Assembly). The videos were shorter, to the point and I could switch subjects. Kind of like classes. I could pick up social media one day and programming the next. That really was knowledge at my fingertips. I’d initially put it down to persistence when I started giving up on MOOCs. That was till I realized that 93% people who took them up were in the same boat (on one hand, there really are very few persistent people) .
The rest of us would be better with shorter learning videos.

I suffered through hell in my financial derivatives classes because my professor didn't know the F of finance (he confused equity shares with preference shares in my final semester’s last class and adamantly requested that we all recheck our textbooks. It was like a finance horror flick).

I could do with a short concept note video a day.

Not more than a 10 - 15 minutes clear and concise video explaining the concept I’d like to learn.

Sure that would beat the idea of getting a fancy degree online (sorry Stanford, Oxford, Pennsylvania), but the learning would happen.

I’d love to dig deeper and talk about this.