rolling online education thread

Anyone still doing any MOOCs? Any courses or providers anyone has good or bad things to say about?

I keep signing up to Futurelearn courses (OU-owned, courses are free but pay for a certificate of "participation" - or some courses allow you to pay even more and sit some kind of test and get a certificate of "achievement" instead) and not managing to keep up with them. Not sure if it's their idea of how long each course takes per week or my idea of how much free time I have and how long I'm spending on things which is way out.

Some of the courses are interesting (some don't live up to their descriptions at all) but each week's work is split into 30 separate pages with a short video on most pages and comments and maybe assignments or things to follow along with. Feels like even just clicking "done", "next" and waiting for a page to load 30 times takes a non-trivial chunk of the 2-4 hours per week, never mind actually engaging with the content.

There's also a higher emphasis on discussion than I'd like. Hi, it's week one step one of the course, everyone discuss in the comments how you hope to apply what you'll learn! Er, I've no idea, I don't even know what the possible applications are yet. Hi, it's week one step 4 of a programming/data course, here's how to add two numbers, let's all discuss the conclusions we can draw from the results of adding two numbers! Uhh. Also I stupidly signed up with my real name like it encouraged me to and have no desire to stick my idiot thoughts on the internet with my real name.

(Sadly it looks like a lot of actual degree+-level distance learning courses also have a required amount of discussion participation per week. Come and be judged by internet strangers and/or just repeat the obvious answers already given by 60 other people for 20% of your degree...)

The difficulty is keeping people engaged - i can't remember the real statistic so i'm going to say that 2.3% of people actually finish the courses they start - and it's often not much more than 10% even if you've paid money for it - so socialisation and the idea of bringing in the full classroom experience, including debate and discussion (not to mention the positive side of wanting to learn so you don't look like a dope in the comments), is seen as absolutely essential.

Working out how not to alienate people who literally just want to tune in, learn and tune out is tough though. The added pressure of peer-to-peer learning / students wanting to help out others who are struggling, as they might in a university context, is probably quite useful from an educational perspective but can add extra time / emotional pressure.