By Professor Doom
Study after study
after study…every day another study, because they’re so easy to do now. The
modern world runs on computers, and computers are just awesome at collecting
and storing numbers. Statistics is good at simplifying those numbers into
easier-to-understand numbers. Nowadays, all a “study” is, is someone taking a
few minutes to use statistics to get some numbers.
Whatever.
Time and again, I
see a study where, even though the statistics are done well enough to get some
numbers, the implications of those
numbers is either never considered, or simply incorrect.
Another thing I
see time and again are administrators pushing online education. I see their
point: if you don’t care anything for education, online courses make much
sense. Massive profit margins and incredible growth of the student base—the
only two things I’ve ever seen admin care about—are both quite possible with
online coursework.
MOOCs, Massively
Online Open Courses, don’t come from admin. They are labors of love, created
and presented to the public, for free, by scholars who legitimately want to
preserve and spread knowledge (you know, the whole purpose of higher education
before admin re-purposed it to growth and profit).
MOOCs are, of
course, online, and open to anyone—admin loves “open admission” normally, since
that greatly enhances growth. They’re also quite free, so not popular with
admin. Trouble is, MOOCs have terrible completion rates.
And here we have
yet another study showing to the public what everyone in higher education
already knows:
The average
completion rate for massive open online courses is less than 7 percent,
according to data compiled by an Open University doctoral student as part of
her own MOOC studies.
--29
courses were looked at, involving hundreds of thousands of students. Yes,
hundreds of thousands.
That’s right,
we’re looking at a 7% completion rate. Granted, it’s common enough to see dubious
schools, even fully accredited ones, get graduation rates below 0.7%, less than
1/10th as “successful” as the incredible failure rate of MOOCs…but here we’re
just looking at course completion.
Now, the
researcher here thinks that the miserably low completion rate signifies the
overall failure of MOOCs, and explains as much:
“…she said
completion rates were indicative of how successful a course had been.
"People might have no intention of completing assessment when they
register, but I don't agree that completion rates are entirely
meaningless."
In no way am I
criticizing MOOCs; they’re free, and open, and perfectly within the mission of
higher education. I want to get to the real issue, the interpretation of the results here, and there are two things we
learn. The first interpretation of results is straightforward:
1.
The vast
majority of college students get nothing out of online courses.
While this is bleeding
obvious, it must be kept in mind. Our “leaders” in higher education know full
well indebting people for online education is hurting people, often hurting our most vulnerable citizens just as
they escape high school. Our “leaders” should also be able to conjecture that
the debt that comes from open admissions is also hurting people. Never in my whole career has a “leader” in higher
education admitted these obvious things, even though every study indicates as
much.
Now I’ll come to
the less obvious result from this study:
2.
The vast
majority of non-free college courses are bogus.
Allow me to
explain. MOOCs are free…they’re very truly open admission, and nobody gets a
check for signing up. I totally approve of MOOCs, in much the same way I
approve of people just going to the library (or carefully perusing the
internet) and learning things on their own. Part of the rationalization for
MOOCs’ low success rate is their open-ness: quite possibly, people are signing
up for a MOOC with no intention of completing the course.
Everyone nods
their head in agreement at this reason, myself included.
MOOCs are free.
College coursework isn’t. While students ultimately can go into debt for their
coursework, in the interim they can get a check. At the often bogus local
community college, students
can even get the check without the debt.
Me: “I have
a number of students registered for my class I’ve never seen, but are getting
financial aid, checks for signing up. Their contact information is hundreds of
miles away. Why are we even registering these students for courses here which
they can take much closer to home? Don’t we have an obligation to help our
students better than this?"
Admin: "They
have a right to come here, and we can’t stop them from checking the box
applying for financial aid."
--I’m not
just picking on a particular school here, lots of community colleges have this
business plan.
When I try to
tell admin that students are coming on to community college campus with no
intention of completing courses, that they’re obviously just coming for the
check…I get no nods in agreement. The “Pell
Runner” scam of students wandering from campus to campus, is well known
in higher education, but no real effort is made to stop it.
But there’s more to the
interpretation of the results of the study than this.
Admin: “We’re placing you on probation. Your retention rate fell below
50% last semester. If this happens again, we will not renew your contract.”
Me: “Did I mention I have many students that never came to class even
once? How can I possibly be held responsible for their failure?”
Admin: “Get your numbers up, or you will be terminated.”
If my retention
rate, the rate at which students pass the course, drops below 50%, admin lets
me know I’m screwing up. There are campuses where faculty must pass 70%, even
85% of students in their courses, every semester. Faculty who pass 100% of their
students generally get awards for “good teaching,” even when they pass students
who never spent an hour on campus.
Many studies have
been done on passing rates in college courses, particularly at the remedial
level. You see around 50% completion rates there, and, as the coursework gets
more advanced, the completion rates actually go higher (I know, that’s a little
unintuitive, but bear with me—there’s a self-selection process at work here).
Most MOOCs are
introductory level courses, so a 50% completion rate seems reasonable enough.
And yet we see around 7%.
What’s wrong with
this picture? MOOCs are put together by faculty who really care about
education, who know what normal coursework should entail, and what it should
mean to complete a course. There’s no profit motive here, just a pure focus on
education.
Most college
courses are not assembled as labors of love. They’re taught by sub-minimum wage
adjuncts, pressured to pass as many students as possible by an administrative
caste that cares nothing at all about education. These administrators just want
to keep students in the system long enough to extract every dollar possible.
So, to summarize,
for MOOCs: online, open admission, no profits, scholarly designed, 7%
completion rate. On the other hand, for non-MOOCs: online, open admission,
massive profits, massive administrative control, 50% completion rate.
Gentle reader,
keep this in mind: every study that shows the low completion rate of MOOCs
should raise the question of why non-MOOCs have high completion rates. Even a
cursory inspection of the differences between MOOCs and non-MOOCs will suggest
an answer.
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