I am a huge fan of MOOCs. I strongly believe that these courses and this style of education will be one of the greatest by-products of the modern internet. I was a happy and eager participant in the 'early days' (I took ~2 years off of work in 2013-2014 to re-charge, and took a number of online courses for fun), and here are some of my thoughts:

- Completion rate is a very poor metric to measure the 'success' of the concept. I attempted more than a dozen courses, but only completed ~4-5 of them. But that doesn't mean I didn't learn anything. For a number of courses, I got a good way through the material (75%+) but got distracted/side tracked (in one particular case, I was 90% of the way through a very challenging and interesting course[1] when a buddy and I decided to do a last minute trip to Mexico for some camping/surfing. Needless to say, it was hard to find internet access out there). Of the courses I completed, at least two of those I had to attempt more than once. But regardless of the final outcome, I learned a ton. There were a few courses that I didn't find interesting and walked away from, but for the most part, I learned something from every course, regardless of whether I completed it or not.

- By traditional metrics, I wasn't the best student in college. There were a number of reasons for this, but a key reason was the inability to focus during lectures. I just hadn't had enough life experience to learn how to optimize my ability to pay attention in class for multiple hours a day. In high school, the class sizes were small and the teachers were engaging enough to make it easy for me. In college (big public university) there were hundreds of students in each lecture and the professors were more interested in research than they were in lectures (with a few exceptions). I now know that I need the right balance of coffee, adequate sleep, and exercise in order to be able to sit through 4+ hours of very dry lectures, but it took years of hard won experience to find that balance. MOOCs are amazing because they let you optimize the 'lecture' time to best suite your schedule and your 'optimum time of focus'. And the forums were a great, asynchronous way to share knowledge between TA's and students (as opposed to my college experience where you had 1-2 office hours per week, with a dozen+ students competing for attention). Had MOOC-like teaching material (video lectures, forums, online exercises) been available when I was in college, I have no doubt that I would have done way better.

- Considering how expensive traditional college is getting, I think a very cool and plausible alternative would be to allow students to spend a few years doing internships/apprenticeships part time, and doing nano-degrees and MOOCs part time. A company could pay for the classes, as well as a stipend/salary for the internship. I learned programming and statistics on the job (seems like it's getting more rare these days for on the job training) but being able to take a step back and take more traditional classes on Coursera helped fill in some of the knowledge gaps that had been developing over the years. I feel like mixing both practical, in demand skills and theoretical knowledge at the same time could result in a much more engaging and deep understanding of the subject matter as opposed to the traditional way of all theory in college followed by all 'hands-on' in the real world.

Anyways, a bit of rant. But it's been a while since a MOOC post has made it to the front page of HN, and it's a holiday weekend!

[1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages Back when I took this, it was just a single course. Looks like they broke it up into 3 parts. Would have been nice to have that option when I took it!