
Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning - jaap_w
http://chewingthistles.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/24-hours-a-long-time-in-online-learning/
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PeterisP
I've had many great experiences in Coursera run by mathematicians, computer
scientists and biologists.

If an "expert in online education" is significantly worse in his/her own field
than a biologist or mathematician, then I'd suggest choosing another, more
suitable profession.

Similar sized and larger courses have been run many times for a year now - if
you want to call yourself expert, then you should be at least a bit informed
what worked/didn't work in these previous huge courses, and what approaches
can't possibly work at that scale.

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tokenadult
Inside Higher Education reporting on same story, with several links to other
detailed sources:

[http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/04/coursera-
force...](http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/04/coursera-forced-call-
mooc-amid-complaints-about-course)

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curiouscats
I am in another Coursera course that seems to be experiencing some issues. It
seems this whole process is like early beta software (not like gmail "beta"
years later...). Which is fine with me as a consumer.

I was a bit frustrated that the process wasn't a bit clearer up front. And it
does seem they haven't really figured out he huge class size issues yet. It
does seem to me it woudl have been better to start out slower and work out
some of the kinks but so much is done so quickly these days I am not really
surprised they jumped in with both feet quickly (it seems to me).

The coursera effort really seems like a pretty audacious effort to me. Running
into issues as they try to make it work isn't that surprising. I do think
pulling the plug if things are really not working seems like the better choice
than just pushing forward. Giving themselves a chance to regroup rather than
try to just forge ahead seems like the better option. Granted not getting into
the mess in the first place would be better but I'm willing to accept the idea
that maybe they just ran into more problems than they imagined and just need
some time to figure out alternatives before doing some great things in the
future.

~~~
americandesi333
curiouscats- Just curious, what course are you taking on Coursera thats
experiencing similar issues?

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27182818284
Big 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.

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monkeyfacebag
It appears the instructor is employed as an "instructional designer" in
Georgia Tech's distance learning program. Superficially, traditional distance
learning programs have something in common with MOOCs, but there are a number
of important differences. An obvious one is scale and it seems like the
instructor was legitimately unprepared for the M in MOOC. Unfortunately, (and
obviously generalizing here) another one is quality. Distance learning
programs have long been second rate and even though the MOOC format isn't
perfect, there are some very good professors teaching fields they have made
significant contributions to, which is not something I've experienced with
distance learning. My take away? You have to vet the instructor.

~~~
PeterisP
MOOC's have significantly different expectations for quality.

In an average university, there are decent professors successfully teaching
students a topic that they know, and have a bunch of years experience in
teaching that topic.

But in a MOOC that is not enough - since a single MOOC can scale to almost all
the world needs for that subject, there is no need for a thousand professors
teaching the same subject, only the best ones. Some things are unavoidably
"lost in translation" due to lack of face-time, but a great prof in a MOOC
will still be better than the perfectly ok professor at your closest average
university.

To do MOOCs the way they should be done, you don't need to "vet the
instructor" in the way that teachers or professors are vetted. The quality
threshold here is very simple - are you one of top 10 people in the world in
your narrow subject area? If not, you don't need to apply.

The great MOOC courses I had were good only because the teachers were far more
qualified than any professors teaching the same subject in 500 mile area from
me, _that_ is the value-add of MOOCs. The courses would not have been great if
they were taught by simply a random good professor from a good university.

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jessaustin
Not 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".

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huherto
It 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.

~~~
robryan
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.

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uladzislau
I don't get it why Coursera can't fix its video player. It's their core
technology right?

I can't resume videos from where I left, every video just opened for 1 sec. is
considered 'watched', to close the video popup on iPad I need to play 'find a
close button' game and overall the user experience of watching videos sucks a
big way.

~~~
ekianjo
Why don't you download them instead?

~~~
Correasa
In this particular course, some videos were heavier than 800 Mb.

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sampo
I 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?

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jpdus
I took the Computational Investment class a few weeks ago (Form Georgia Tech
too) and it suffered similar problems. Poorly prepared and no comparision to
the great Stanford classes. I guess Coursera does not have a real QA
department yet, but this will surely improve over time.

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nborwankar
I've been following the MOOC wave since the "early 3" Stanford classes back in
Fall 2011. I've continued both on Udacity and Coursera partly auditing and
partly participating.

The fiasco with the MOOC class, IMHO, was probably avoidable.

For one MOOCs of the Coursera/Udacity scale have been around for little over a
year and I doubt even Andrew Ng/Daphne Koller or Sebastian Thrun would call
themselves experts in what a MOOC is. No one knows yet and we are in a
transient phase while this new knowledge works its way though the academic
environment. What MOOCs will be next year is very different from what they are
today. So for someone other than a founder of a MOOC to teach a class on MOOCs
raises some questions. Creating models of what a MOOC is while the area is in
such flux only creates more noise in the channel. For another how is it a
surprise that 40K+ people signed up, for any MOOC instructor at Coursera, let
alone for a class on MOOCs.

It's unclear how Coursera let a class on this topic be offered not even
counting the QA issues.

While OP raises many issues in the blog post about this class and the
instructor there are similar patterns in many other classes.

MOOCs as they exist today are massively instructor/university/vendor centric.
This is partly because they are an incremental step away from a university
experience and instructors are leraning how to play in this new arena. Also
because they are free and the value to the student just of the content and
structure is huge. So the motivation to expend the effort ot make it
additionally student centric is small. The current state of the art is more
than good enough and will be for some time.

Even then there are somethings I have seen on Coursera which could be
relatively easy to do and improve the experience for everyone.

There needs to be some sort of experience sharing forum for course instructors
so knowledge sharing takes place. This seems to be missing as evidenced by
comments in the first week by many instructors asking for patience as they
work out the kinks and learn the ropes.

Specifically instructors need to have data on previous instructors' class
experience - what worked what didn't. Maybe this is available but perhaps it's
not being used enough.

Suggestions to instructors from what I see over the last year

* Think through your class requirements will it scale - this is not your university class on video - it's a massive beast that needs to be fed.

* Will it be secure on an Internet scale. For instance the absolutely excellent Data Analysis class by Jeff Leek of Johns Hopkins. He had to remove a requirement for people to submit executable R code in assignments bec it would run on other people's computers during peer-evaluation. Not criticizing this class but asking will future classes have this data point available to them? Not sure.

* any special things you need to do for your class (such as the Google spreadsheet usage in the class mentioned by OP) - has it been done before at the scale. Do you have TA's or support staff that have done this before? Pl. don't use the class as a scaling experiment.

* be available on the forums if possible or make it some TA's job to monitor all forums (not sure how one person could do this especially as the class progresses) Jeff Leek being live on the forums makes the class extra special.

* if possible create weekly video "screenside chats" like Jennifer Widom did in the very first online Intro to Database class from Stanford - they were excellent as were the Google Hangouts by Thrun/Norvig in the AI class. Andrew Ng's closing statement after his Machine Learning class was very deeply felt. While student centricness is not expected at this stage - communicating with students in this fashion makes your class much more engaging and you much more human. Also it's likely (wild ass guess) that completion rates might improve with this - worth investigating. I also remember emails from the AI class exhorting students not to give up. In contrast I have received emails from classes (not to be named) congratulating me on how awesomely I have done when I haven't even logged in once :-)

* as far as # of quiz attempts and using late days there is a wide spread of parameters across classes. My suggestion as a working professional is that 5 late days for say 8 quizzes and 8 assignments is not enough. In addition I found that a 4% penalty per late day was probably much more reasonable than a 50% penalty. Other than that 1 quiz attempt is too little but 100 is too many somewhere in the region of 5 seems more appropriate.

That's all for now - hope this is helpful.

~~~
dizzystar
I'm currently taking the Single Variable Calculus by Professor Ghrist from
uPenn, and I think it hits all the correct notes:

\- Prof G and several of his TAs are in the forums. If you post a good or
interesting question, they will show up and offer an answer.

\- The class is incredibly complete: way more complete and self-contained than
any other MOOC that I have tried. Prof B is incredibly knowledgeable and
quirky to say the least.

\- With the above said, the class demands a ton of self-study, but it is
backed up with a lot of homeworks. Each lecture has a hw associated with it.
They do have an attitude that you must struggle with the material and keep
doing it over and over until you get the questions right and it starts to
become second-nature. They pull this off by never giving answers to hw's.

\- Despite the attitude with the hw, they have given amazingly complete
answers to Exam 1 and Exam 2

\- They offered a diagnostic exam before you start. This would let you know
right away if this class will beyond your head.

\- They really put some time into the class. The entire course is beautifully
hand-drawn and I think the professor said that the drawings alone took 1200
hours or so. If you add in the Exams, hw, and the exam answers, there must be
something like 1500 hours committed to making this course great.

I'm not entirely sure what to think of the grading:

4 Exams at 5% of the grade each Final = 80% of the grade.

I sort of like it because it gives you a bit of room to screw up and recover,
but it is definitely shattering to do bad on an exam and start worrying about
how bad the final may turn out. It is an interesting way to encourage you to
take the work.

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donretag
Since 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/>

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Turing_Machine
Not 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.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
If the article reflects the truth in any way, it sounds to me like the
instructors were in over their heads.

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bencollier49
This will make an interesting case study, in worldwide PR as much as anything.
As a Brit, I hadn't heard much about Georgia Tech until now, but I'm pretty
certain that if I wanted to take a global MBA, I wouldn't go to the place with
the famously incompetent MOOC instructor.

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aheilbut
40,000 students are demanding their money back.

~~~
xianshou
Coursera's free.

~~~
jacalata
That's the joke.

