How NOT to design a MOOC: The disaster at Coursera and how to fix it — from onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com by Debbie Morrison
Excerpt/update:
Note: I’m also enrolled in Coursera’s E-learning and Digital Cultures, with University of Edinburgh, which is so far excellent. What I wrote in this post is exclusive to the course Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application. I also completed Introduction to Sociology, through Coursera last year which was quite good.
Update: This course is now ‘suspended’. Participants received this email February 2, at 4:17 pm (PST). “We want all students to have the highest quality learning experience. For this reason, we are temporarily suspending the “Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application” course in order to make improvements. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause. We will inform you when the course will be reoffered.”
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From DSC:
There will be many more disasters I’m sure. But as with learning, failure is to be expected (some would say mandatory) and learning is messy. This is especially true when technological change and innovation are moving at ever-increasing speeds.
The questions that comes to my mind after reading this are:
- We still need to experiment — but how do we experiment with MOOCs on a smaller scale?
- How can we keep things manageable?
- Can bloggers help in sharing what’s working and what’s not? (Like Debbie did.)
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