One of the co-founders of the online education company Coursera claims that shorter classes – courses that run just three weeks, for example – are better for students than longer courses.
This runs against the grain of traditional thinking in higher education, where classes generally run 12 weeks and sometimes even longer.
Coursera, founded by Stanford University computer science professors Andrew Ng and Dapne Koller, has become one of the bigger players in offering Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
Headquartered in California, Coursera began offering classes in 2012. The online education company now partners with more than a dozen schools. Among them are such big names as Stanford University, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, Georgia Tech, Duke University, University of Washington, Rice University, University of Edinburgh, University of Toronto, John Hopkins University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Virginia.
The company offers more than 450 online courses and has expanded globally with partners such as the University of Tokyo and Edinburgh University.
Ng recently told Linked In columnist George Anders that he “can’t think of a single reason why classes should automatically be 12 weeks or more.” According to the Linked In article, Coursera has data showing that longer courses end up having a higher dropout rate among students.
That could be attributed to the average age of Coursera students – 30. Many of them are people who already have a full-time job and are looking to widen their horizons by taking courses to improve themselves professionally or personally.
However, as Ng pointed out, even those who start with good intentions may drop out because “life gets in the way.”
Reacting to the research, Coursera professors have been encouraged to make classes as short or long as they see fit. Now, the online education company’s typical course runs just six weeks, and some are as short as three weeks. According to Anders on Linked In, 73% of all Coursera courses run nine weeks or less. Oddly, one of the ones that isn’t “A Brief History of Humankind,” which runs a massive 17 weeks.
Some traditional schools are trying out the new model rather than sticking to the time-honored 12-week course length. For example, second-year students in Stanford’s Graduate School of Business can take a two-week course on financing their own business acquisitions, according to Linked In.
