How To Increase MOOC Completion Rates
Addressing online education’s low completion rates and how to turn them around
A lot has been written lately on the low completion rates of online learning. And since MOOCs and online education aren’t going anywhere, but only going to become more prevalent its more than worth a look.
New York Times declared 2012 “The Year of the MOOC”. Sites like Udacity, CoursEra, and Kahn Academy are attracting users by the millions. Across the world eager learners are able to receive access to world-class education that would usually cost $50,000 for FREE. SERIOUSLY, think about that. You could now get a Harvard or Stanford education for free. And not only that but you can mix and match the best courses from each institution — EVEN BETTER.
I remember the feeling when I signed up for my first one — Startup Engineering on Coursera from Stanford. “Are you f***ing kidding me?! This is awesome! Not only is this class free, but it’s also project-based, there’s a competition, there’s 100,000+ students and I’m going to show these schmucks how awesome I am.” Disclaimer: Despite a great course, thank you professors Balaji S. Srinivasan and Vijay S. Pande, this schmuck did not win the competition. Which provides an even greater twist: the quality of talent that is found within these courses.
To get back on topic…hundreds of thousands of students are signing up to take these courses; high quality courses. Yet, Udacity, founded by the man, the myth, the legend, the godfather of Online Education himself, Sebastrian Thrun has only a 7% completion rate. And Udacity isn’t alone, according to a recent report, most MOOCs have below a 13% completion rate.
This is becoming a hot topic of concern, and Sebastian Thrun has pivoted Udacity to focus on corporate training (primary motive: profit), but I don’t see this as a negative at all. Actually, I see at as quite the contrary — a necessity in any lifecycle of growth, learning, or innovation.
The 3 Stages of Innovation
I like to think of any act of acquiring a new skill (learning) as having 3 stages. The initial boost of excitement of ideation and creation, the second phase of bumps in the road and deletion, and the the final stage of modification and growth if you identify the correct modifications that need to be made.
You may say “Well thats all fine and dandy, but what does this innovation of online education have to do with learning or acquiring a new skill?” What is innovation? Isn’t innovation the act of learning a new skill as a group of people? When the internet came along, didn’t we as a society have to learn it — how to use it, how to valuate it, what we would make it into. Same when the app market came about. And now with online education. We have this new power to give education to the masses, but we have to learn how to maximize its potential to effectively educate students worldwide. So yes, I think of innovation, and learning a new skill as one in the same — as learning something new.
This graph by Tim Ferriss which he deems “The BiPolar Learning Graph” will help us visualize these 3 stages:
Let look at this in regards to the innovation of the internet since we should all be familiar with its course events. With regards to time I’m going to jump through its history fast. Yes I know there are many other factors, but I’m making a quick analogy to warm our brains up for the deeper stuff. The initial growth in the curve was the formation of the internet and all its initial cool new offerings. “Man we can buy things online now and get our homework done a lot faster, this is awesome!”
I then like to think of the dip as the dot-com burst. We got caught up in all the coolness of new capabilities and business ideas and we hadn’t really learned how to valuate those ideas. The result — a bubble burst. Then we had to relearn together as a society of how to use the internet, and how to evaluate its offerings correctly. I’d like to argue we’re somewhere on the plateau now and maybe passing the inflection point. It may not seem like we’ve learned much, which is exactly the definition of the plateau according to Tim Ferriss, but we are learning from our past mistakes and it is allowing for companies that are providing true value to flourish and lead us out of the slump — Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc.
So that was a fun exercise. Now let’s look at online education. It exploded in 2012. I like to call it the “Online-education-is-going-to-take-over-the-world” phase.We were so enthralled by the possibilities of MOOCs and hundreds of thousands of people were and are signing up that we had that beginner excitement. Now we’re starting to see the realities of online education and innovation. That we must learn how to use it effectively. That we must combat low-completion rates. We are somewhere along the downhill slump of the above graph and we have to figure out what to modify and delete so that we can turn around and start heading to the plateau and then the point of inflection.
This is in no way bad in my opinion. On the contrary it is a necessity in innovation. Any time something new comes along you get excited. You’re learning something new. “Its Awesome!” And you throw a bunch of shit against the wall and you see what sticks. We now have to identify what sticks.
What Could Stick ?
Fortunately for us we have hundreds to thousands of years of our own face-to-face education systems’ failures and successes to compare the current implementation of online education to. Lets pinpoint certain positive characteristics of our education system that is absent in online education.
Stakes
Stakes are what makes you follow through on your learning. Or put another way, what motivates you not to quit. Think of all the reasons why you finished that term paper you didn’t want to do or pull the all-nighter for a test. Or hell, completed high school and graduated college. Those reasons are the stakes we need to create. Once we identify them we can replicate them in an online learning environment to increase completion rates.
- Accountability — Lets face it. Most of the time we did school work or completed a course or went to college its because society told us thats what we were supposed to do. Your parents told you had to finish school. All your friends were doing it and you didn’t want to look like the dummy that wasn’t smart enough to pass that class. Society engrained in your head that school was a measuring stick and you didn’t want to lose confidence. I’m guilty too. So how can we replicate this? How can we instill accountability into our online education enrollments. A lot of people like to post their monthly goals to their blog so its public and nobody wants to be seen as all talk and no action so they follow through. Is there a system similar to this that we can instill?
- Losing Something — There are two things you could lose in the current education system that motivates you to follow through — your tuition and potential salary. How many times have you or someone you know heard “You better get good grades. I’m paying for your tuition. Do you know how much your school costs.”? Or something similar to that. You don’t want to waste your parents money so you go to college. Or you go to college because they promise you that you’ll earn more. “College graduates earn more on average than high school graduates. You want a nice house and to be able to provide for your kids right?” This is the easiest one I can think to implement. Do a reverse pricing scheme on courses. Since we’re talking about MOOCs and they tend to be free keep them that way…if the student completes the course work. Say its a project-based course, if they complete the final project their credit card isn’t charged the $100 dollars. If they don’t then the teacher just got a $100 bonus. Oh yeah! This would also negate people signing up just for the hell of it and you could provide a teaser amount of material so people could see what they’re learning before committing.
Any others you can think of?
Investment
This goes along with anything in life — relationships, job, physical goods, etc — but the greater your investment in something the harder it is to detach or quit. When you, or your parents, pay for school you’re invested. You don’t want to and they don’t want you to quit because if do you basically gave away that money. Once you’re in school and nearing a promotion point — graduation — you’re invested. You’ve already put in that much work. You don’t have that much more till you’re rewarded.
So how can we make people invested in online courses. The obvious answer is to charge them. People value things they pay for. But what about those that are less fortunate and don’t have the money? How can we make them invested? An application process would the most obvious possible answer to me.
Also this is a good place to mention that these completion rates may be skewed some by people wanting to see the material in courses which they must enroll in first to do so or enrolling so they won’t forget about the course when it launches and then never following up. I look at this as a false-investment because at those points they have no investment in the course but use enrollment as a means to browse or as a reminder. These outliers are simply fixed by allowing people to get a taste of course material before enrolling, having watch lists for courses, and including the initial investment discussed above.
Intimacy and Collaboration
This may have some overlapping effect with accountability, but according to the chart, a recent study by Katy Jordan of MOOCs’ class size vs completion rate, there seems to be a negative correlation between the two with a visible line of demarkation of no courses achieving greater than 15% completion rates at >60,000 students.
So what does this tell us? Think back to college. Did you have greater desire to go to class and perform in lecture hall classes of >200 plus courses or the small intimate ones? For me it was the latter. Now I know there are tons of other factors that go into that decision — specialization of the subject, harder subject matter in the more advanced, smaller courses, etc — but overall there was a lack of intimacy in the larger classes and I had no problem missing class and neglecting the students in them. But, MOOCs are supposed to be big. That’s the beauty in them!
Okay well companies are supposed to grow too, but once they get too big they aren’t flexible any more and can’t innovate. Google is huge and continues to be at the forefront of innovation. How do they do it? Teams and small groups. Lets take a note from Google.
I think this part could be big. I enjoy learning in the natural school setting because I can collaborate, there is a sense of community, and I don’t feel like I’m going at it alone. Sometimes online I feel like I’m a number in a see of students and feel alone in my learning.
Lets take these MOOCs and give them a sense of collaboration and community. Create small groups within the courses. Encourage meetups. Have the professor do hangouts with their students. If the course’s enrollment is too large to do hangouts then appoint group heads or TAs in charge of certain geographic areas. This is ultimately why students love face-to-face education and enrolling in universities. They want to feel a part of something. And with classes they want to have that figure head where they can get the ultimate yes or no answer from. That’s where the groups heads and TAs come in. This set up in turn could lead to accountability and investment. Students are invested in their group and start forming relationships so that they don’t want to be the one that doesn’t finish the course.
Quality of Content and Product-Market-Fit
This is where it gets tricky. What makes you want to go to or do the work in one class versus another when you were or if you are in school? Other than that hot girl or guy you sit next to I’d argue its because of how interested you are in the class. What determines how interested you are? Both if you like what you’re learning — the content — and then, how it is delivered and the coursework, which come together to form quality of the content.
Lets first discuss the quality of content. Skillshare argues that its completion rates — 36% — are much higher than the average MOOC because of the way their courses are set up. They are all project-based and time independent, meaning you can do them at your own pace. While I agree with the project-based part, I’d much rather partake in a course that is teaching you how to create and do something versus those that are memorization and test-based, some skew in the data may come from the fact that students are invested in Skillshare courses because they have to pay for them.
So how do you make your course content better? In leiu of saving this post from being twice as long I won’t go into too much discussion here. I say get your students doing and creating and make your courses project-based, but ultimately it depends on the interests of your actual students if your going for completion rates. Which takes us to product-market-fit. Or as I like to call course-market-fit….
Maybe courses don’t have high completion rates not because they aren’t delivering quality courses, but that they are delivering courses and content that no one cares about — confusing I know. So how do you avoid this? You get feedback of what the students want. What do they want to learn? Ask them.
Do they want to learn how to develop native iPhone apps or how to develop web apps with a mobile view? Even more specific if you’re teaching a course on Ruby on Rails development. Do they want to learn it by developing a Pinterest-esque application or a twitter-like app? Do they want more beginner material or advanced? MOOCs are attracting thousands to hundreds of thousands of users. Rockstar professors have thousands of followers. That’s a lot of potential feedback. Leverage it. Find out what they want and give it to them.
Its equatable to the difference between best-selling authors and those that are “just” good writers. Best-selling authors know how to leverage their fans and followers to write what they will read. How to find out what they want and answer them. Once they know what their followers want and topics that are of interest to them they simply write on those topics. Also in the process the users are invested. They’ve given feedback. They’re invested with their time and opinion. Oila! They have something people want to read. Professors will now have courses people want to learn and complete.
Bringin’ It All Together
So what does this all mean? We’re in a beautiful age where we can share information faster and to more people than ever before. We can educate and learn together at rates and quantities greater than ever before. It’s awesome! And we’re in this process of learning how to do online education. Our job is to make it as effective as possible. That’s the fun part. Trying new methods out and throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. It’s time to experiment and figure out what works and doesn’t. Here’s to the future of online education…
