Thousands of People Sign Up for Online Classes They Never End Up Taking
How, then, should professors calculate a course's pass rate?

My first massively open online course ended recently, and I just can’t stop asking multiple-choice questions.

So, back to my opening pair of answers. The “two-thirds who never showed up” are the 36,378 people who never encountered any course content after enrolling. That number is 66 percent (or 55,412 enrolled minus 19,034, the number who actually at least started to watch one lecture).
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Admittedly, we don’t have many four-person elective classes here at Northwestern’s Medill School, where I teach journalism in some of those bricks-and-mortar buildings, so the comparisons do finally break down somewhat. But then again, the sophomore has limited tuition dollars as well as limited choices. The MOOC-omore has limited time and attention, but hundreds of choices, whether among other online courses or other life activities.