Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning
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Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning
#2It is very ironic that the worst class is precisely that one about online education. May be it is a class about what not to do.
Re: Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning
#3Inside Higher Education reporting on same story, with several links to other detailed sources:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/04/coursera-force...
Re: Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning
#4Not sure why they would give the students access to the raw Google Spreadsheet rather than using a write-only Google form.
1) Collect name, email address with Google form. 2) Run simple macro to assign to groups. 3) Sorted. As it were.
Re: Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning
#5Not only do they have to upgrade their system, but they're going to have to replace most of the course material for "Week 3: Architecture, or Just Use Google Docs".
Re: Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning
#6Not sure why they would give the students access to the raw Google Spreadsheet rather than using a write-only Google form. 1) Collect name, email address with Google form. 2) Run simple macro to assign to groups. 3) Sorted. As it were.
If the article reflects the truth in any way, it sounds to me like the instructors were in over their heads.
Re: Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning
#7I don't understand complaining about the "without warning". If the course was so bad there was no hope getting it to work, surely the best decision was to stop it. So how should they have killed it with a warning? Send an email with "we are going to close this class in 2 days"? Would that have been better?
Re: Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning
#8Since the course was offered by Georgia Tech, hopefully the Computing Education blog (run by a GT professor) will have more details: http://computinged.wordpress.com/
Re: Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning
#9It is very ironic that the worst class is precisely that one about online education. May be it is a class about what not to do.
Yeah, I think if the course was on something else people might have been a lot more forgiving. I guess the instructor has spent some time with the theory side of online education but is totally out of their depth with doing it in practice.
Re: Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning
#10Big fish in a small pond moved to a much larger pond :-(
After reading I get the strong vibe that the instructors had online education experience in the context of the 20-person online classes that have existed at universities years before MOOCs. Then they moved into the giant MOOC pond thinking it would be the same. Unfortunately, they found out they were now small fish in the big pond of 40,000 eyeballs judging and crashing systems that previously worked smoothly.