1) There have been a few different experiments with self pacing and retention at schools like Oxford (and a college in Iowa of all places). The typical result is a significant increase in retention with lower stress. The problem, and fundamental reason why this isn't the norm, is simple logistics. Trying to build a serial system of education that still uses classrooms is massively difficult. The closest you can get is a compromised 6 week class system that is still extremely difficult to pull off. Parallel is just easier and more cost effective to administer. It's also easier and more cost effective to administer on an online system which is why the push for MOOC. The difference for us is that we care more about optimizing the learning process itself and real evaluation and guidance, and are willing to bet that enough students also care about those points to give us a chance at proving it at a large scale. Our system costs a little more than free, sure, but the difference in results can be dramatic, as you are seeing with your masters program.

I don't have the 7% study at hand, but I'll try to look through my list of references to see if I can track it down. They cover some statistics on retention in this article: http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...

As for in-major hours, it may vary a bit by school (and MIT has a higher percentage than most), but here is the breakdown for UT. In-major credits required for a CS bachelors: 45. Average credits per class: 4. Weeks in a semester: 14. Average classes per week: 3. Total estimated lecture hours per class: 42ish. Total in major lecture hours for 45 credits: about 500. Subtract intro days, quiz and final days plus time for class to get settled, etc.. and you have somewhere around 400-450 hours left, or 100 per year, 2 per calendar year week or 3.5 per school year week. Some semesters you might not have any in major, some you might have 2 or 3, so remembering 8 hours in a week of classes is not outside of the data set.

2) A student should not have to know the exact set of skills necessary to build up to the higher level concepts. This is one of the problems with the self directed learning attempts in traditional schools. But, if the student has a clear end goal in mind (say, the goal of becoming a search engineer at Google), then a JIT system that can build a sequence of courses based on the concepts within the course is more effective and targeted than a standardized fire-hose curriculum. Speaking of fire-hose, I'm working on a post covering context switching in a parallel educational system that addresses exactly why this is such a problem.

3) This comes back around to the top down (or goal oriented) approach, and gets even more interesting with a mentor guided approach. Imagine a hybrid apprentice/mentor system where the mentor can define a sequence (or collection) of high level concepts which the learning system could then take and generate a path to master those concepts. All the while, the mentor could provide direct guidance and assistance where needed and help answer the tough questions that arise without having to dedicate all their time to the actual instruction. There are many, many, variations on this pattern that work extremely well with JIT systems but really don't work at all in JIC.