Mooc completion rates hovered at single degree percents.
The vast majority of people do not complete.
The people who do complete are outliers. I suppose we can build for outliers, but then most people are just going to be ignored in this system, and if they have way to respond (vote), they won’t be happy about it.
Most academic education is already built for outliers. Courses are designed around building up to the next generation of professors. Most knowledge that's taught in university is unused, basically wasted education for 99% of the "person-facts" that are picked up by the class.
This isn't true, education as a whole is built for the majority of people. If we look at K-12 it's explicitly built to work best for the neuro-typical child with a normal household. Outliers struggle, and they need other systems to catch them, like special education.
> basically wasted education
People say this but they don't understand how learning things works. Learning is inherently cummulative, everything builds off of everything else. We can't skip steps because then there will be holes. It's a big Jenga tower, and you're essentially advocating taking pieces out willy nilly because you don't think they're important.
Even coding, if you look at it, relies on English. English language arts and computer science are, in a lot of people's minds, completely opposite each other in the sphere of education. But they're actually not - because coding is a subset of the English language. Even naming variables, the people best at it are also the people who are good at conveying meaning in an essay. Because it's the same problem: conveying to an audience your intention as concisely, yet clearly, as possible.
Some relationships are obvious, like you can't learn calculus without algebra without arithmetic. But most are non-obvious.