Is Coursera Taking Hundreds of Thousands of Students on a Shakedown Cruise?

By Robert McGuire. It’s bedtime Sunday and my phone is buzzing to alert me to incoming messages. A lot of this is regular communication about the numerous MOOC courses I’m signed up for. Assignments are usually due at the end of the week and for new material goes live at 12 a.m. Mondays, so the automated announcements about scheduled items beginning or ending tend to arrive at this hour of the week.
The last few weeks, though, the phone rattles across the nightstand more than usual. Mixed in with the usual traffic is an increasing volume of panicky sounding dispatches from a professor in one particular course which seems to have been infested by tech gremlins and cascading miscommunications. Students have apparently been emailing her, anxious that particular features of the course — some of them tied to mandatory assignments — aren’t working properly. As with many of life’s tech/communication mishaps, there is a quality of un-reproducible fiasco to the back story  (In this case, it seems a forum set up explicitly to discuss tech problems didn’t itself function properly and became a vector of bad information.) Read more...