I think your suggestions are good. I've found that the weakest element of Coursera courses were discussion. Even with heroic efforts of the volunteer tutors, th

I think your suggestions are good. I've found that the weakest element of Coursera courses were discussion. Even with heroic efforts of the volunteer tutors, the forums still end up cluttered and confusing. For this person to come in and try to push everything towards a student centric approach is... scary... Student interaction is what has traditionally had the most trouble scaling. Assigning teams via Google Docs wouldn't have worked for most large sized university classes, let alone a class of thousands. Coursera now has a major issue: universities now understand that a publicly (spectacularly) failed course can tarnish the university's image. I know a number of professors in academia and the university bureaucracy is what they're constantly fighting. The bureaucracy kills off innovation and hates taking risks. I fear many professors will not be allowed to teach from Coursera or similar MOOC platforms due to the possibility of damaging the university's public standing. This was already an issue before, considering these MOOCs don't directly benefit the university and could in fact be lowering their revenue (i.e. distance based learning). The failure of this online course could have a far wider impact than just annoying 40,000 Coursera students.