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Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning

• huherto 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
• tokenadult 14y ago
  Inside Higher Education reporting on same story, with several links to other detailed sources: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/04/coursera-forced-call-mooc-amid-complaints-about-course http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/04/coursera-force...
• Turing_Machine 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    If the article reflects the truth in any way, it sounds to me like the instructors were in over their heads.
• jessaustin 14y ago
  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".
• sampo 14y ago
  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?
• donretag 14y ago
  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/ http://computinged.wordpress.com/
• 27182818284 14y ago
  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.
• PeterisP 14y ago
  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.
• jpdus 14y ago
  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.
• curiouscats 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    curiouscats- Just curious, what course are you taking on Coursera thats experiencing similar issues?
• uladzislau 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    Why don't you download them instead?
    • revskill 14y ago
      Because their hard disk is full ;)
    • Correasa 14y ago
      In this particular course, some videos were heavier than 800 Mb.
  • natural219 14y ago
    This appears to be a bug with the Chrome HTML5 player. Changing your video player to Flash should fix it, or just watch the videos in Firefox. I agree, though, the video player overall is steps behind Youtube and others. I'd guess it's because they built their player from scratch (it being a core technology) and they have lots of kinds to work out to get it up to modern video player standards.
  • PeterisP 14y ago
    Yeah, their video player needs improvement. For me, the pause doesn't work properly if I pause for any significant time. If I pause the video for a minute, then everything is OK, but if I go to brew tea, then when I come back, the video always freezes after unpausing (well, it shows a couple seconds that were buffered) - probably they have some timeout issue there.
  • pamelafox 14y ago
    Coursera engineer here. Yes, we've seen that the video player can be quite buggy for some. We haven't tracked down all the issues, but some of them seem to be due to the HTML5 browser player not working as well in some browsers. Some people are more successful using the Flash fallback or downloading the videos. We are working on moving to a new video player library and specifically looking at iPad improvements (button placement/clickability). Sorry for your bad experience, and thanks for the feedback.
• aheilbut 14y ago
  40,000 students are demanding their money back.
  • xianshou 14y ago
    Coursera's free.
    • jacalata 14y ago
      That's the joke.
  • ajjuliani 14y ago
    I'd demand my "time" back.
• nborwankar 14y ago
  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.
• monkeyfacebag 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
• bencollier49 14y ago
  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.