That being said, I think student-generated content would be wonderful! I am digging the team work in the DNLE class, although the forced competitiveness of it is getting annoying (I’m just there to explore and learn, not compete). I think it would have been cool to let us form our own teams in the history class and then do something. I hate to say write essays because they don’t actually end up anywhere. But, something (the only thing) my sustainability coursera class did that I found helpful was to have us create **anything** that related to sustainability and went beyond the scope of the class. People made websites, children’s books, approached their legislature, etc. I’m not sure what that would look like for a history class, but I think that’s part of the challenge. I’m discovering that I think every class should facilitate some thinking around “what do we *do* with this knowledge?”

I like Dan.

I am digging a big hole for myself.

But this raises a question: did the 80,000 people who signed up for this course expect to be able to chat after class with the professor? Did they expect to be a part of a global forest of Twitterers sharing their thoughts on the subject?

Is the subject matter so dull that I need Silvia – a fellow student from Arizona, joining us now via Skype – to ask if slaves ever ate sugar coated cotton? “Well, that’s an interesting question, Silvia.”

I think that the subject matter and the teacher’s enthusiasm and presentation of that material should (and do, in this case) speak for themselves.

Having said that, I think the discussion forum is a good idea that isn’t really working. A symptom of that failure is the lack of questions being asked by students.

Also, I like it when we cross to the control room and Dan gets a go. 1869, what? This is great stuff for those of us who are slow learners.

My last point is this: surely, the beauty of the MOOC is the re-usability of the video lectures? And the time saved not recording lectures could be used to create a weekly exposé of a side topic: the Language of History, for example. Or we could have a fifteen minute lecture that shows how the weeks topics fit on a timeline.

Vim, no need to feel guilty. The attrition rate on this course is akin to all the others. Life catches up with you, and if you’d had the spare time for a course you’d have been reading more books anyway. I do like your idea of more dynamic graphics. One critique I have of myself is that I use the images too much as if the lecture were an oral book, with the images as embellishments. The problem, and here’s some fodder for Jonathan, is that I can’t do the more spontaneous, “hey let’s look at this sleeping peasant — what’s that all about?” in the broadcast booth because there are no students to riff with. So the interactivity is gone that helped bring images to life. I’ll have to look into more lively images, then — like burning elephants. (Good luck getting the credits for that one!).

On the forums, it’s true they became a bit of a free for all, until I started to post my own focus questions. Usually I log in every day and follow two or three threads and wade in there so we can drill deeper into a question. But it’s not spontaneous or “real-time” like Twitter. But then the good old fashioned lecture was about the epitome of the one-way passive learning artifact that still dominates the humanities and social sciences.

One way around this is an open-forum structure, like Anne’s suggesting. I could skype some of this and students could text in their queries, objections etc. I am going to try this next time, like a bit of a call in show on line. Both Vim and Anne are right that the real-time interactivity is critical. Once upon a time, Anne, I was going to surround the Global Dialogue room with screens with Coursera students skyped in so they could participate, and I would do much less of the hosting and instead turn the guest over to the world. But our Info Tech people just didn’t know how to wire the room the right way.

Anne – the lectures are getting a bit better because I am getting more familiar also with my solitude in the broadcast booth. Weird, eh?

Hey Laura – great idea. When Daphne Koller and I were talking about rolling out my course, I told her my original idea was to have students build archives of their learning. Start with a blank map of the world and fill it in over the course of the semester with stuff you learned, including sections with burning elephants smashing into the walls of Delhi. By the end of each fortnight, students would have not an essay but a personally created map of their learning with all kinds of embedded information and analysis. She thought this was cool, but didn’t think her engineers could design the software in time, so we shelved it. You are reminding me that I should get Daphne’s team back on this.