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Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have the potential to enable free university-level education on an enormous scale. A concern often raised about MOOCs is that although thousands enrol for courses, a very small proportion actually complete the course. The release of information about enrollment and completion rates from MOOCs appears to be ad hoc at the moment - that is, official statistics are not published for every course. This data visualisation draws together information about enrollment numbers and completion rates from across online news stories and blogs.

"The idea is simple (although the software is so complex it took a year to build): before posting a comment in a forum or below an article, users must rate two randomly selected comments from others for quality of argument and civility (defined as an absence of personal attacks or abuse). Ratings are crunched to build up a picture of what users of any given site will tolerate, which is then useful for flagging potentially offensive material."

"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."

"The rising discount rate, coupled with enrollment declines at several of the institutions surveyed, is a reflection of the myriad forces that are making it harder for colleges to get students and their families to pay top dollar for a college education. Those forces include a decline in the number of traditional-aged college students, increased competition for students with the ability to pay, decreased household incomes, increased scrutiny of tuition hikes, and more questioning of the value of a college degree."

"Between 2006-07 and 2011-12, average published tuition and fees at public four-year colleges and universities increased by about $1,800 in 2011 dollars, an annual rate of growth of 5.1% beyond inflation. The average net tuition and fees in-state students pay after taking grant aid from all sources and federal education tax credits and deductions into consideration increased by about $170 in 2011 dollars, an annual rate of growth of 1.4% beyond inflation."

Schools and libraries subject to CIPA may not receive the discounts offered by the E-rate program unless they certify that they have an Internet safety policy that includes technology protection measures. The protection measures must block or filter Internet access to pictures that are: (a) obscene; (b) child pornography; or (c) harmful to minors (for computers that are accessed by minors). Before adopting this Internet safety policy, schools and libraries must provide reasonable notice and hold at least one public hearing or meeting to address the proposal. Schools subject to CIPA have two additional certification requirements: 1) their Internet safety policies must include monitoring the online activities of minors; and 2) as required by the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act, they must provide for educating minors about appropriate online behavior, including interacting with other individuals on social networking websites and in chat rooms, and cyberbullying awareness and response.

"CourseTalk is what you might expect - an early stage Yelp for MOOCs - a place for students to share their experiences with these courses and a way to discover new courses they'd enjoy. Given that it's still nascent, the platform's design is simple and its user experience is straightforward: Visitors can use the general search bar which is front and center, or peruse through "Top Rated," "Popular" and "Upcoming" verticals, or search by category, like Business, Computer Science, etc."

"To nudge students toward job-friendly degrees, the governor's task force on higher education suggested recently that university tuition rates be frozen for three years for majors in "strategic areas," which would vary depending on supply and demand. An undergraduate student would pay less for a degree in engineering or biotechnology - whose classes are among the most expensive for universities - than for a degree in history or psychology."

I remembered it this morning when I drove past a Google self-driving car and then again a few minutes later when a Tesla whipped past me and a third time during the same commute when I dictated an email to my mobile phone. Sometimes living in the Bay Area does feel like the living in future. But to Gibson's point, not every region can claim to have self-driving cars on its highways or electric car ownership or smart phone penetration rates as high as the Bay Area. Why not?

Colleges are raising tuition and fees every year, at a rate of increase that far outpaces any reasonable expectation. One might think this is the kind of thing that couldn't continue forever, but that's precisely what has been happening over the past several decades. Prices have gone up, and buyers have poured in anyway, buoyed by a flood of seemingly cheap government money in the form of student loans. As with any bubble, there are doomsayers who are mostly ignored and cheerleaders who say that this time it's different. But-as with any bubble-reality is starting to intrude.

"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."

"The success of San Jose State University's (SJSU) incorporation of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) into their curriculum is indisputable: in side-by-side comparisons of two traditionally-taught sections of an introductory electrical engineering course with an edX-provided MOOC variant, the pass rates went from 55-59 percent to 91 percent.[1] This mirrors results that the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University has been achieving for years. However, interestingly, SJSU incorporated MOOCs as a course supplement in a flipped classroom. If you think about that, it is the beginning of disaggregation of MOOCs into technological (big data), content and pedagogical (peer learning) components."

"We feel the pernicious practical effects of lengthy copyright terms every day. For example, a study last year of books on Amazon showed that books published after the critical public domain cut-off date of 1923 are available at a dramatically lower rate than books from even an entire century before. The result is a "missing 20th century" in the history of books."

The top-ranked schools all focus on engineering, including Harvey Mudd College, California Institute of Technology, Polytechnic Institute of New York University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and SUNY - Maritime College. At the bottom of the rankings was the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, which had an opportunity cost of $155,000 to attend in 2012, including living expenses and lost wages from not working. The school had a graduation rate of 37 percent while its 30-year net return on investment was projected as a loss of $228,000, Payscale.com said.

The only thing we've heard from Coursera is that their idea for charging people for certificates of completion netted $220,000 in Q1 of this year. Given that Coursera's annual burn rate seems to be in the neighbourhood of $10M (that's on top of their partners spending $50K/course to place it on the Coursera platform), this is peanuts.

"After about two decades of steady growth in the number of graduates, the country likely peaked at about 3.4 million graduates in 2011 and will see a modest decline over the next few years, according to a report released Thursday by the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education. According to the report, the number of graduates will fall in the immediate term, settle at about 3.3 million graduates a year by 2014 and begin to grow gradually starting in 2020, but at nowhere near the rate seen from 1990 to 2011."

As more and more mechanisms are built to provide meme-tracking data on social media campaigns, marketers are able to provide more and more dazzling charts and graphs on reach and impact. Social media memes are a high impact, low cost way to show audience engagement. When that engagement is good, it's great. When that engagement is faux-bad (in the case of Hamm's junk), it's also great. While it's not always possible to demonstrate that audience engagement translates into ratings, or sales, or donations, engagement is a good thing in and of itself, right?

In retrospect, 2012 may well be remembered as the year when Internet technology enabled the popularity of MOOCs-or massive open online courses-a form of disruptive or transformative education currently growing at a meteoric rate.