College Dropout Problem Spreads to Online Education – MIT Free Online Course Loses 90% of Enrollment Before the Mid Term

Maybe the Free Courses Charged Too Much

Harvard and MIT are providing on-line courses free to students around the world and based on MIT’s experience with demand for this type of education things ought to be looking pretty good.

Harvard’s involvement follows M.I.T.’s announcement in December that it was starting an open online learning project to be known as MITx. Its first course, Circuits and Electronics, began in March, enrolling about 120,000 students,

Except of those 120,000 students not all made it to the mid term

 some 10,000 of whom made it through the recent midterm exam. 

Okay, though, maybe free on line courses will ultimately lead to free or low cost college education.

But Harvard and M.I.T. are not the only elite universities planning to offer a wide array of massively open online courses, or MOOCs, as they are known. This month, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan announced their partnership with a new for-profit company, Coursera, with $16 million in venture capital.

But what is more likely is that these schools will find a way to make big bucks from the idea.