A lot has been made of MOOC Completion Rates (and how low they are).

I've completed 10 MOOCs and probably started four or five times that. For a given course, the average completion rates are much lower: often low single digit percentages.

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Critics of MOOCs on this basis, however, miss the point.

MOOCs register students at a much higher point in the funnel than most other course delivery approaches.

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Enrolling in a MOOC isn't like enrolling in a college course, it's like looking at the course catalog and thinking a course might be interesting.

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No one would measure "book completion" by how many people who "Looked Inside" a book on Amazon read the entire book.

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I frequently drop out of MOOCs because:

1. it wasn't the right level (too easy or too hard)
2. I didn't like the style of it
3. I didn't have the time to put into it
4. there were too many other interesting MOOCs competing for my time

MOOCs let me evaluate this *after* I've enrolled (and been counted as a enrollment statistic).

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I'm currently "enrolled" in eight courses on edX alone that start in the next couple of months.

I have no intention of doing all eight. I'd struggle to manage three at a time.

But the nature of MOOCs lets me try them all before I narrow down the two or three I want to focus on.



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If I pick two MOOCs of the eight to continue with, saying I have a 25% completion rate is nonsense.



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https://twitter.com/gnat/status/552736935223914496

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Nat makes a great point. There are courses which I've chosen not to do the exercises on but which I just watched the lectures for (or plan to, so have kept enrolled even though course is finished and I've "failed").