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"Preliminary results of a study of 16 massive open online courses offered through the University of Pennsylvania show that only a small percentage of people who start the courses finish them-and that, on average, only half of those who register for the courses even watch the first lecture. The study, conducted by the university's Graduate School of Education, is reviewing data from about a million users of the courses, which Penn offered on the Coursera platform, from June 2012 to June 2013. Two of the seven researchers involved-Laura W. Perna, a professor of higher education, and Alan Ruby, senior fellow for international education-described the study on Thursday in a presentation at the MOOC Research Conference now under way in Arlington, Tex."

"We want to challenge both the president's and the faculty member's narratives, not because we want to replace them with a "better" or "truer" one, but because the most interesting conversations happen when people on both sides of the argument start realizing that the situation is more complicated than they thought it was."

"I don't mean to imply any untoward motives by the makers of MOOCs. I'm not arguing that the content or methodologies of most current MOOCs are wrong because they are based on the dominant Western academic approaches. But I do believe it is important to point out that a powerful emerging educational movement strengthens the currently dominant academic culture, perhaps making it more difficult for alternative voices to be heard."

"Most of the conversations were about the pitfalls of producing MOOCs. I wanted to talk more about how universities that may use other schools' MOOCs might consume them. Most of the people here are from disciplines outside of the humanities, so I tried to explain that what works in math or CS will not necessarily work for history, especially history survey classes. While everyone seemed interested in improving pedagogy, there was a kind of disturbing assumption underlying all my discussions that any class that doesn't use technology is somehow broken by definition."

"Across all geographic regions, the study found that MOOC students have high levels of educational attainment: 83 percent of those who responded said they had earned either a two- or four-year post-secondary degree, far more than international averages."