MOOCs fail to engage students

MOOCs like to advertise how many students are taking their courses but at the same time struggle with the fact that only a small percentage (5 - 10%) actually complete the course. This is not entirely surprising of course, many times I have signed up to audit a course simply out of curiosity with no intention of completing. The problem often stated by universities are short attention spans, and so they try to make shorter, higher-production-value videos. Often I am surprised just how uninteresting and bland these videos are, the problem is not short attention spans, it is that MOOCs, in general, completely fail to provide engagement or community to students.

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The internet lacks platforms for bringing people together to learn collectively

Boundless are the number of learning platforms and MOOCs offered by universities but MOOCs fail to engage students and are generally taken alone without much sense of community or peer-interaction. There are few platforms which bring people together to learn or work on a problem collectively. Complice tackles accountability with silent coworking rooms, but is not a binding agent bringing people together around a single task or topic but rather a catalyst for each person's individual goals and projects.