Once Weak Results, San Jose State Severs Udacity Partnership

Low completion and high failure rates are plaguing on-line courses since their inception. these issues were highlighted ast week once san jose state university announced so it was ending its partnership with huge on-line open course provider udacity once the courses offered as half as to the pilot program showed that as a general rule only between 20% and 44% of students passed them, writes carla rivera regarding the l.a times.

The objective as to the partnership was to supply low-cost for-credit on-line alternatives towards the common introductory and remedial categories. the pilot consisted of the remedial math, elementary statistics and college-level algebra courses. restricted to actually 100 students, the courses were funded partly via the national science foundation grant. 2 extra courses – laptop science and introduction to actually psychology – were added this summer. every one cost $150 and ran while not any outside funding.

Though 83% of students completed the courses, the low pass rates raised enough issues regarding the college to actually discontinue each the pilot and also the partnership.

Udacity ceo and co-founder sebastian thrun was unavailable for comment, however the university and also the company released a joint statement explaining the choice.

A statement released by san jose and udacity outlined a few areas of study :

“The improvements we are considering embody developing introductory materials which can facilitate students prepare for and pursue college-level on-line categories. we'd additionally like to seem with the impact as to the frequency of quizzes for grades and different similar incentives to assist students move in the material because we are part of a timely manner. another focus will just be to actually explore opportunities to actually migration to open-registration, self-paced categories with student-set deadlines. ”
junn aforementioned knowledge are still being analyzed which a full report might possibly be out there in early august.

Ppreliminary results indicate that students in ancient courses outperformed their peers enrolled within the on-line version by a substantial margin. will be'>which might be explained partly by a substantial variety of students in on-line pilot not being enrolled in san jose state and who were truly highschool students from low-income families.

Rather puzzling was the massive variety of students from oakland military institute. 3 weeks directly into course, instructors realized that omi students didn’t have full accessibility to computers.

Students within the summer courses received a lot of orientation, and anecdotal proof suggests their performance is higher. junn aforementioned pulling the courses regarding the fall term was a reliable chance to “take a breather” too as consult faculty who have expressed issues concerning the direction of on-line education. the courses will just be offered once more next spring, she aforementioned.

The udacity/san jose state project was announced in january with a lot of fanfare by gov. jerry brown, who has also been pushing the state’s public universities to actually aggressively pursue on-line education.