<story><title>For Online Courses, Questions Over How Success is Measured (2014)</title><url>https://www.texastribune.org/2014/01/21/low-completion-percentages-moocs-prompt-debate/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gamesbrainiac</author><text>I think this emphasis on completion rates are a problem. I take a lot of MOOCs, but not all the content in said MOOCs are important. I just watch the parts of courses that are important or relevant to what I am doing, and call it a day.&lt;p&gt;For people learning from non-conventional sources, they are used to using bits and pieces from different online sources and building up their own courses and their own paths.&lt;p&gt;This fascination with completion rates is simply our propensity to value what we measure instead of measuring what we value.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Chathamization</author><text>Very much this. I think a large issue with MOOCs is that they&amp;#x27;re too focused on emulating the structure of a university class - focus on lectures, community built around specific classes, focusing on the metric of course completion rather than on attaining skills, etc. People who successfully teach themselves things (and right now, there are many people using the internet to teach themselves things) often have a very different approach.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s interesting that so many people have trouble even considering that there might be other ways to approach education.</text></comment>
<story><title>For Online Courses, Questions Over How Success is Measured (2014)</title><url>https://www.texastribune.org/2014/01/21/low-completion-percentages-moocs-prompt-debate/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gamesbrainiac</author><text>I think this emphasis on completion rates are a problem. I take a lot of MOOCs, but not all the content in said MOOCs are important. I just watch the parts of courses that are important or relevant to what I am doing, and call it a day.&lt;p&gt;For people learning from non-conventional sources, they are used to using bits and pieces from different online sources and building up their own courses and their own paths.&lt;p&gt;This fascination with completion rates is simply our propensity to value what we measure instead of measuring what we value.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xchaotic</author><text>I was recently watching some courses on AWS, I passed the actual exam but I only watched a few videos where things were a bit ambiguous for me. 
So the completion metric is not very useful or accurate IMO.</text></comment>