Why do people think retention is a good thing?! I think retention is actually bad even for classical education.
The lower the retention rate, the more the likelihood that they are following lots of courses at the same time or multitasking with something else. This means that people are "exploring" more! I think that "exploratory learning" has always been stifled by classical organized education and is one of the reasons why I hate most academic environments (yeah, they're cool if you're in one of the top 10% unis or in a "privileged" position", but not for the rest of cases...). I believe that, after a certain level of baseline knowledge, in any field, it's actually more important that someone learns "what they want/need/have inclination for/find more interesting" than that they "learn more"! Maybe more time exploring and less time actually uploading things to your mind is better (not "productive", just "better", and I said "fuck productivity" a lot lately because I found that it just doesn't lead to better anything). All the new ways of doing education make exploration easier (as in you can explore a lot without really "wasting" that much time), and we should take advantage of this!
The lower the retention rate, the more the likelihood that they are following lots of courses at the same time or multitasking with something else. This means that people are "exploring" more! I think that "exploratory learning" has always been stifled by classical organized education and is one of the reasons why I hate most academic environments (yeah, they're cool if you're in one of the top 10% unis or in a "privileged" position", but not for the rest of cases...). I believe that, after a certain level of baseline knowledge, in any field, it's actually more important that someone learns "what they want/need/have inclination for/find more interesting" than that they "learn more"! Maybe more time exploring and less time actually uploading things to your mind is better (not "productive", just "better", and I said "fuck productivity" a lot lately because I found that it just doesn't lead to better anything). All the new ways of doing education make exploration easier (as in you can explore a lot without really "wasting" that much time), and we should take advantage of this!