In his New York Times Article "After Setbacks, Online Courses are Rethought" from December 10th, 2013, Tamar Lewin addressed the breakdown posed to the MOOC industry that resulted from the MOOC Research Initiative, funded by the Gates Foundation, and organized by George Siemens.
There were 28 projects presented at the initiative's December 5th, 2013 conference held in Arlington, TX, but one in particular splashed over into the public conversation via Lewin's article: a study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. | George Siemens was the first to distinguish MOOCs as a platform that either was connectivist (cMOOCs) or that mimicked traditional education models (xMOOCs) based on transfer of content (video lectures and quizzes, etc., aka, the "banking method" of education). |
Taken from "The Lifecycle of a Million MOOC Users," this screen shot says it all:
Together with Alan Ruby and Robert Boruch, Laura Perna gathered data concerning over a million participants in 16 Coursera courses over a year (June 2012-June 2013). The shocking news is that only around 4% of those registered in the MOOC persisted to completion. Lewin connects this failure to Sebastian Thrun's response to the unexpectedly poor results from the San Jose State University Udacity experiment, wherein students from each of the pilot courses were outperformed by students engaged in the traditional delivery of the course.
What's interesting to note is that the conversations about the disruptive nature of MOOCs largely hinged upon their potential to reach out those who lack access to higher education, among other issues, and now, with this forced detour, a translation is in progress. Here is how Max Chafkin put it in his Fast Company article, "Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather of free Online Education, Changes Course":
The shift away from academic forms to vocational-focused learning is precisely the translation Thrun has begun given the detour required of MOOC proponents who must take heed of the cacophony of nay-sayers. Yet, with this translation, other actors may be more willing to become enrolled in the MOOC project, but under a different aegis, for instance, SPOCs instead of MOOCs.