I found a couple of stories that point out two interesting aspects of the demographics of students taking recent courses from Udacity and Coursera.

The first one makes it clear that a large fraction of the students who come to these courses do so from outside the U.S, especially from developing economies. I believe this is because, in emerging economies, the gap between demand for training and supply of quality instruction is enormous.

The second article points out that most students who sign up for such online courses do not finish them. In one particular example, only 1,466 students (about 2%) out of the 70,000 who preregistered for a course actually received their certificates of achievement.

While most people see this as a bad thing, I see this as a pretty good thing. It is completely understandable why so many people drop out—it’s because there is little barrier to signing up, and dropping out. What I’d instead like to draw attention to is the fact that 1,466 students finished a university-level class taught by an expert instructor!

Can you imagine how many semesters that would have taken for equivalent course offline?