I have also taken programming MOOCs (algorithms 1 and 2, databases, and computational investing), and the programming assignments are a good fit for MOOCs - it'

I have also taken programming MOOCs (algorithms 1 and 2, databases, and computational investing), and the programming assignments are a good fit for MOOCs - it's easy to check the result from running a program (for example, the sizes of the five largest strongly connected components of a directed graph consisting of almost one million nodes). In the fall, I took Financial Markets (Yale, from Coursera). I don't know if that qualifies as humanities or not, but it did have a peer-graded component that worked better than expected. Each week there were multiple choice quiz questions on the videos. But one week there was also a writing assignment. You had to read a fairly technical paper on market efficiency, and then answer three questions on it with max 300 words each. After the deadline, you have to grade 5 other students answers (as in "Did they summarize the main points correctly?"). This worked much better than I expected. Summarizing the main points, and then reading through and grading 5 other answers really made the content stick. So I was actually pleasantly surprised at how well it worked. But I think it the peer reviewed writing works best when the assignment is a fairly focused question to answer. My reviews of the courses: http://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms-course/ http://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms-course... http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-course-part2/ http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-course... http://henrikwarne.com/2011/12/18/introduction-to-databases-on-line-learning-done-well/ http://henrikwarne.com/2011/12/18/introduction-to-databases-... http://henrikwarne.com/2015/01/01/coursera-course-review-computational-investing-part-1/ http://henrikwarne.com/2015/01/01/coursera-course-review-com...