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"I'm beginning to think there's a fourth stage, one that I saw a few times at last week's "Multidisciplinary Research for Online Education" (MROE) workshop in Washington, DC. Apparently, when you get together a bunch of people in Stage 3, some of them move to Stage 4: Stage 4 - Maybe all those "dropouts" got just what they wanted out of the course."

I am considering a MOOC on Gamification that starts April 1.

"But most students who register for a MOOC have no intention of completing the course, said the company's co-founders, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng. "Their intent is to explore, find out something about the content, and move on to something else," said Ms. Koller."

"In 2016, more than 40 percent of all students who started at a four-year college six years earlier had not yet earned a degree. Odds are that most of those students never will. In real terms, this means that nearly two million students who begin college each year will drop out before earning a diploma."

Not surprisingly, nearly half of the dropouts said they left because of fears about privacy and ethical concerns about how their personal data would be used. Many did not want their private information sold to advertisers or were worried about unauthorized disclosures to people they didn't know. (Prior studies have found that older people tend to pay more attention to privacy issues than younger users, a trend that was supported by this data.)

The idea that a college diploma is an all-but-mandatory ticket to a successful career is showing fissures. Feeling squeezed by a sagging job market and mounting student debt, a groundswell of university-age heretics are pledging allegiance to new groups like UnCollege, dedicated to "hacking" higher education.

"The relatively low completion rates of learners have been a central critique as MOOCs grow in popularity. This focus on completion rates, however, implies a monolithic view of disengagement that fails to acknowledge alternative forms of participation in MOOCs. Identifying subpopulations of learners based on their longitudinal engagement with the course allows MOOC designers to target interventions and develop adaptive course features. We develop a simple, scalable, and informative classification method that identifies four prototypical engagement trajectories: Completing learners, who complete the majority of the assessments offered in the class; Auditing learners, who do assessments infrequently (if at all) and engage instead by watching video lectures; Disengaging learners, who do assessments at the beginning of the course but then have a marked decrease in engagement, generally in the first third of the class; and Sampling learners, who enter and exit the course quickly, watching a minimal number of videos at some point during the course."

"If you have an exercise bike in the back room, you could be the small selection of people that use it everyday to get fit. But then again, you could be one of many more who bought it in the hope of regular practice but were unable to make it part of your routine. The MOOC or Massive Open Online Course, which has come to prominence this year, often has much the same effect. Students may enrol in the online free courses from prestigious universities in their tens of thousands, but overwhelmingly they bomb out with attrition rates up to 80-90%."