Surprising Things About School
The failure of MOOCs #10 is a failure of metric measurement.<p>In the old days if you wanted to learn something, often you&#x27;d pay $20 to $50 for a book.  For example, Amazon order search claims that somewhere I have a copy of &quot;Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming&quot; by Norvig, which is supposed to be a decent book in the field, cool.  Ironically maybe that IS the textbook for the famous AI MOOC class, I don&#x27;t know, maybe it should be if it isn&#x27;t.  However I never finished the class, only glossed thru the book, and barely remember either.<p>I was curious about the topic, not trying to meet someone elses arbitrary goalpost, and the &quot;graduates&quot; metric isn&#x27;t a useful number.<p>Kinda the difference between running because its a beautiful day out and I need exercise, and running a competitive marathon against live athletes in person solely for the goal of getting a number when I run thru a gate.  I would guess in the general public the former outnumbers the latter 50 to 1, so the MOOC stats aren&#x27;t unusual at all.<p>Another interesting analogy is &quot;The Mona Lisa&quot; painting is a failure if you measure its worth solely based on number of PHD students graduating who give it credit for them selecting &quot;Art History&quot; as a major.  That doesn&#x27;t mean it needs to be burned as a failure.