by Anya Kamenetz, Diverse Education
It’s pretty easy to guess why most of the students didn’t pass these courses. Most fundamentally, many of them lacked basic access to computers or the Internet at home.
Second, the course was basically being designed and taught at the same time, which is hardly best practice for any kind of course. This resulted in many errors and lapses in communication.
The third issue could be dubbed the “worst of both worlds” problem. Students in these courses didn’t have face-to-face support from qualified instructors, as they would in the classroom. They also didn’t really have the leisure to explore their curiosity or to work at their own pace, as they would in a truly open online learning environment, because the course was shoehorned into a traditional 12-week semester with deadlines, exams and grades—a factor that probably contributes to the generally poor completion rates of MOOCs as well.
http://diverseeducation.com/article/54903/#
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