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husiasm for MOOCs seems to follow the trajectory of New Year’s diet resolutions. More than half of the students who enrolled in MIT’s circuits course didn’t even bother to complete the first assignment, and just 7,157 students (or less than 5 percent of enrollees) passed the course.

More than half of the students who enrolled in MIT’s circuits course didn’t even bother to complete the first assignment, and just 7,157 students (or less than 5 percent of enrollees) passed the course.

Granted, there are no papers to grade, and assignments aren’t free-form, but how does one professor handle so many students? We had four teaching assistants, and my initial plan was that they would spend a lot of time on the discussion forum, answering questions. One night in the early days, I was on the forum at 2 a.m. when I saw a student ask a question, and I was typing my answer when I discovered that another student had typed an answer before I could. It was in the right direction, but not quite there, so I thought I could modify it, but then some other student jumped in with the right answer. It was fascinating to see how quickly students were helping each other. All we had to do was go in and say that it was a good answer. I actually instructed the T.A.’s not to answer so quickly, to let students work for an hour or two, and by and large they find the answers.

Most students who register for MOOCs don’t complete the course. Of the 154,763 who registered for “Circuits and Electronics,” fewer than half even got as far as looking at the first problem set, and only 7,157 passed the course. What do you make of that?

EdX operates under an honor code, with no way to verify that the student who registered is the one doing the work. Is that likely to change? It’s quite possible employers would be happy with an honor certificate. We’re looking at various methods of proctoring. We have talked about people going to centers to take exams. There are also companies that use the cameras inside a laptop or iPad to watch you and everything else that’s happening in the room while you take an exam, and that may be more scalable.

The idea of dropping off tablets outside of the context of schools is a new paradigm for OLPC.

iving computers directly to poor kids without any instruction is even more ambitious than OLPC’s earlier pushes. “