Online classes may be changing education, but students’ study habits are not.
About 90 percent of students drop out of these massive open online courses, according to major course providers.
“MOOCs are courses that are, in general and certainly for UF students, are not taken for credit,” said Andrew McCollough, assistant provost for teaching and technology. ”As a consequence, it is not surprising that in terms of enrollees finishing the course, the number is relatively low.”
However, this doesn’t mean the mission of the courses has failed, he said. The main idea of this type of education was to provide higher education at low or no cost to everyone, which doesn’t involve providing grades and credentials.
“You can imagine that if you were interested in robotics just because it sounds strange and exotic, and you enrolled, that if after the first few lectures, it became too technically involved for what you were interested in, you’d drop out,” said McCollough.
UF’s page on Coursera shows six massive open online courses.
McCollough calls these courses “altogether different” from online education, which UF has recently dived into with the creation of UF Online, the country’s first entirely online public university.
“The expectations will be similar in rigor to that of a regular student,” he said.
This must be true, he said, because graduates of this program will receive the exact diploma as on-campus UF students.
“The student who enrolls in UF online will be motivated by the possibility of acquiring not only the knowledge but also a certification that they have acquired that knowledge,” he said. “It’s a much more traditional approach to education.”
UF students like Kristopher Davis, a 21-year-old history junior, call the idea of these courses interesting.
“It sounds like something like the Gutenberg Project,” he said. “Where you get a whole lot of free resources that will help you better yourself that might not have anything to do with what you’re studying in an actual paid class.”
Davis said he thinks that more research is probably necessary to refine the business model and to discover ways to motivate students to complete the classes.
A version of this story ran on page 1 on 9/27/2013 under the headline "Open online courses rarely finished"
