Only four percent complete massive open online courses: setback or growing pains?
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have relatively few active users, and user engagement falls off dramatically, especially after the first one to two weeks weeks of a course. Ultimately, only a handful of users persist to the course end.
That's the gist of a recent study from a University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) study. The study's authors, Laura Perna and Alan Ruby, analyzed the movement of a million users through sixteen Coursera courses offered by the University of Pennsylvania from June 2012 to June 2013.
I read “KB Crawl sort la tête de l’eau,” published by 01Business. The hook for the article is that KB Crawl, a company harvesting Internet content for business intelligence analyses, has emerged from bankruptcy. Good news for KB Crawl, whose parent company is reported to be KB Intelligence.
The write up contained related interesting information.
First, the article points out that business intelligence services like KB Crawl are perceived as costs, not revenue producers. If this is accurate, the same problem may be holding back once promising US vendors like Digital Reasoning and Ikanow, among others.
Second, the article seems to suggest that for fee business intelligence services are in direct competition with free services like Google. Although Google’s focus on ads continues to have an impact on the relevance of the Google results, users may be comfortable with information provided by free services. Will the same preference for free impact the US business intelligence sector?
Third, the article identifies a vendor (Ixxo) as facing some financial headwinds, writing:
D’autres éditeurs du secteur connaissent des difficultés, comme Ixxo, éditeur de la solution Squido.
But the most useful information in the story is the list of companies that compete with KB Crawl. Some of the firms are:
At the time of writing, Bitcoin has fallen from its $1000-plus value, but it’s still sitting high at just $100, or so, less. Because of the ruthless competition involved in Bitcoin mining, intrepid internet entrepreneurs have been moving over to the cheaper, though less competitive alternative, Litecoin. If the trend continues, Litecoin will soon mimic the cutthroat community of Bitcoin, losing its practicality. Furthermore, if you find all of the cryptocurrency rhetoric and serious-business economics articles sucking all of the fun and joy out of trying to make a digital buck, then the internet’s most beloved Shiba Inu is here to save the day.
It appears Dogecoin is a real (insofar as any digital currency — or currency, for that matter — is whatever “real” means) digital currency for which you can mine using a computer. In this case, though, you’re digging using a doge house, because there’s still humor left in the world.
The facts are indisputable, the conclusion painful. The wealthiest people in the U.S. and around the world have used the stock market and the deregulated financial system to lay claim to the resources that should belong to all of us.
This is not a matter of productive people benefiting from their contributions to society. This is a relatively small number of people extracting massive amounts of money through the financial system for accomplishing almost nothing.
1. They Create Imaginary Money That Turns Real
The world’s wealth has doubled in a little over ten years. The financial industry has, in effect, created a whole new share of global wealth and redistributed much of it to itself.
Only four percent complete massive open online courses: setback or growing pains?
