By Carl Straumsheim. A professor's plan to let students in his Coursera massive open online course moderate themselves went awry over the holidays as the conversation, in his words, “very quickly disintegrated into a snakepit of personal venom, religious bigotry and thinly disguised calls for violence.” But some students have accused him of abusive and tyrannical behavior in his attempts to restore civility. The 10-week course, titled “Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World,” is taught by Ebrahim Afsah, associate professor of public international law at the University of Copenhagen. His experiences highlight an important challenge that the scale of MOOCs presents: How do you wrangle tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of students into staying on topic? A traditional face-to-face course might fare well with one or two troublemakers, but those interruptions are magnified when enrollment reaches the thousands -- especially if those students can post anonymously. Read more...25 janvier 2014
Everything in Moderation
By Carl Straumsheim. A professor's plan to let students in his Coursera massive open online course moderate themselves went awry over the holidays as the conversation, in his words, “very quickly disintegrated into a snakepit of personal venom, religious bigotry and thinly disguised calls for violence.” But some students have accused him of abusive and tyrannical behavior in his attempts to restore civility. The 10-week course, titled “Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World,” is taught by Ebrahim Afsah, associate professor of public international law at the University of Copenhagen. His experiences highlight an important challenge that the scale of MOOCs presents: How do you wrangle tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of students into staying on topic? A traditional face-to-face course might fare well with one or two troublemakers, but those interruptions are magnified when enrollment reaches the thousands -- especially if those students can post anonymously. Read more...
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