By Jena McGregor, The Washington Post
It’s hard enough avoiding online distractions if you’re a working professional. The news alert about a favorite sports team, the insistent tug of social media sites, the seventh email from a group of co-workers chiming in about where to go for lunch. One study has shown that completion rates for such MOOCs are often less than 10 percent. It’s that concentration-challenged group of people that Cornell researcher Richard Patterson opted to study in a working paper recently published on the school’s Higher Education Research Institution Web site. (It has not yet been published in an academic journal.) Patterson, a PhD candidate in policy analysis and management at Cornell, saw an opportunity to apply behavioral economics research to online education.
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