Helping students stick with MOOCs

To some degree, that's inevitable: Many people who enroll in MOOCs may have no interest in doing homework, but simply plan to listen to video lectures in their spare time. Others, however, may begin courses with the firm intention of completing them but get derailed by life's other demands. Identifying those people before they drop out and providing them with extra help could make their MOOC participation much more productive. The problem is that you don't know who's actually dropped out -- or, in MOOC parlance, "stopped out" -- until the MOOC has been completed. One missed deadline does not a stopout make; but after the second or third missed deadline, it may be too late for an intervention to do any good.