Inane article compares how much online student study compared to online

Students in Free Courses Study, but Not as Much as Most Students Do – Wired Campus - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Most students in free online courses don’t spend as much time doing classwork as do traditional college students, but they do log a significant number of hours, according to a new survey of more than 4,500 MOOC students by Class Central, a website that reviews free courses.

More than 55 percent of the students surveyed said they studied two to five hours per week, and 22 percent said they spent six to 10 hours per week studying.

How does that compare with traditional college students? About 43 percent of first-year residential college students reported spending more than six hours per week studying, according to the Fall 2014 edition of the Freshman Survey,

Not only is the "study" the author sources for online study, poorly executed but the author appears to make no distinction between full-time students (in the Freshman Study) and part-timers (MOOC students).

 

It's really kind of silly. I'm taking a MOOC course right now, on Coursera, on Statistical Inference. It is a very rigorous course, but it only covers a fraction of what would be covered in a 3-semester-hour Statistical Methods class. Comparing the time spent studying between the two is just dumb.

 

It's also a matter of goals and objectives. I'm not taking MOOCs to earn a degree.

For me, taking a MOOC reminds me of the senior citizens who used to audit courses at UofS for free. They would enjoy the class. Sometimes they missed class. Sometimes they took the tests. Sometimes they didn't. Sometimes they actively participated. Other times they would just hang around.

It was a sloppy comparison to begin with and they failed to execute it in a way that actually produced useful data. So trying to extrapolate a conclusion about MOOCs from it is just going to fail.