Are your grades killing your grandmother? Dan Ariely’s prescription: The perfect MOOC

By Dan Ariely. As winter creeps into spring, it’s getting to be midterm exam season across America’s college and university campuses. That means the risk for college students of losing a grandmother will soon spike by 10 percent. A few months down the road, before finals, the risk will climb 19 percent.
Duke behavioral economist and psychologist Dan Ariely has a preventive prescription: enroll in a MOOC — one of those Massive Open Online Courses, and you might just save your grandmother some fatal stress about your exam performance. Huh?
Stay tuned — Ariely’s good at explaining irrationality. He taught his first MOOC — “An Introduction to Irrational Behavior” — last year, and as it was just getting started, reported on the pluses and pitfalls of teaching online for Making Sense. When the course was over, he told us he was surprised how time-consuming teaching a MOOC was. He wasn’t sure if he’d do another one. More...