<i>As Thrun was being praised by Friedman, and pretty much everyone else, for having attracted a stunning number of students--1.6 million to date--he was obsessing over a data point that was rarely mentioned in the breathless accounts about the power of new forms of free online education: the shockingly low number of students who actually finish the classes, which is fewer than 10%. Not all of those people received a passing grade, either, meaning that for every 100 pupils who enrolled in a free course, something like five actually learned the topic.</i><p>1.6 million times 5% = 80,000. Still an impressive number.<p>I've probably started 20 MOOCs and completed 3.5, so I'm part of that "low completion" statistic. I often fall behind the posted deadlines because I have so much on my plate. That's not a knock on MOOCs; if it's a knock on anyone, it's on me. The quality of MOOCs is (IMO) as high as for most big-lecture college courses. (It's not yet as good as for a 20-person course.) However, when you have a full-time job plus side projects plus family, and you don't have the social pressure of having to pass 8-10 courses per year, you have to be really motivated to complete the work, especially within the deadlines. But is it a loss or gain to the world if someone completes a MOOC 6 weeks late? Or gets only 60% of the material? It may not be as much of a gain as the traditional college course provides, but it's a gain in absolute terms.<p>If those 80,000 students are getting the same quality of course as they'd get at Stanford, that's <i>fucking huge</i>. Not a small accomplishment at all.<p>I wish people wouldn't write off MOOCs because, yes, they're the crappy first iteration that only early adopters care to power through. They're not ready to replace traditional education, the latter being a gigantic trillion-dollar problem that touches all sorts of deep sociological problems.<p>The problem is that you have a lot of hucksters in education (<i>cough</i> Knewton <i>cough</i>) who massively overpromise, raise a lot of money, and don't deliver much. They've damaged the reputation of the space immensely. The truth, however, is that online education is a good thing and it's (albeit slowly, with fits and starts) getting better. If there's anything worrying to me, it's that our ability to educate each other is, while improving, not doing so <i>quite</i> as fast as the rate of technological change. But I guess that's a good problem for the world to have.