Comment Many of them are crap (Score 1, Insightful) 122
The big problem with Massive Open Online Courses is that, in most cases, the content is recycled lectures with no quality control. Stanford's machine learning course is mostly watching Andrew Ng at a blackboard, with bad handwriting. I watched a Khan Academy course on moments of inertia, and it was full of basic errors - clockwise and counterclockwise reversed, no distinction between a free body and a pinned one - errors likely to confuse anybody new to the subject.
Where's the post-production? Where's the production value? Where's the checking and Q/A? Of course students are dropping out and failing. The product quality sucks.
We have all this compute power and aren't using it to help with the process. Most of these "courses" are just streaming video with some textual material to go with it. We're not seeing systems where users solve problems and, when they get the wrong answer, the system tries to figure out what they did wrong and coach them. The Plato system did that in the 1960s. There have been systems for teaching programming which did that. But no, we just have lectures and texts.
if you want to see how to train people, look at the US military. The military has to train huge numbers of not-super-bright people in complex technical skills, and they've been doing it for decades with good success. Their approach isn't cheap; there are lots of visual aids, simulators, and setups for practicing skills. "Tell, then show, then do" is the mantra of military training.