Interesting developments in San Jose States online classes... scary!

[GoodYellowDogs]

San Jose State suspends online courses Davis Enterprise

[FilMor]

"The school and Udacity plan to look into providing more information about the syllabus at the beginning of the class, so students are better informed about the requirements before committing. Officials also want to look at whether the online semester should be longer than traditional school terms to provide students with more flexibility."

I signed up for the Java programming course and didn't get a syllabus until after the course started, which sucks because If I knew the pace of the course beforehand I would've never signed up for it. The course had graded programming projects every 3 days and they weren't easy.

[Yanji]

This isn't really very surprising. I was looking at the failure rates of some open universities around the world and common first year courses such as Calc I, Intro Biology, Intro to Computer Programming, etc. all had 35-50%+ failure rates. San Jose State charging only $150 per course only made the problem worse. Reducing barriers to entry like admissions and cost are laudable, but it comes with consequences such as people not taking courses seriously, people coming into the course completely unprepared and of course, "pyjama people". Pretty much every open university out there has accepted this as the reality they have to work in to achieve their mission.

Even at a regular university, the failure rate is generally very high in the first year. Sometimes, people need a taste of failure to motivate them to change their ways.