The term strikes me as mocking, as in, Who are these “superprofessors” who think everyone in the world wants to watch their lecture videos? I certainly don’t think that professors developing MOOCs would use the term to refer to themselves. (Well, maybe one or two of them would…)

As a mathematician, I also think of supersets, which are sets that contain other sets. That metaphor doesn’t work here, however, since the professors teaching MOOCs don’t typically have other professors “contained” within them, working as teaching staff for the MOOC.

Superprofessor has entered the lexicon as the name of the professor doing the teaching in any MOOC course. I’m not sure who coined it or when, but I’ve seen it enough to know that it has become value-neutral for most people who use it.

Personally, I used to associate it with “Superman” in an ironic sort of way, but now I think of it as super as in “superscript,” as a term that describes their metaphorical placement with respect to the gigantic crowd in the MOOC.

I have to ask why you use the term “superprofessor” here. I can read that term several different ways. What do you mean when you use it?

I can certainly understand why you wouldn’t want to talk superprofessor salary if you’re not a superprofessor. Now I’m also wondering how limiting your superprofessors themselves will find your process. Certainly I’d chafe at what you describe, but the salary would help me overcome those restrictions. If the MOOC machine runs itself though, how long will Coursera even need those superprofessors?

I’ll also add that working with an outside provider has been somewhat limiting, but perhaps not as limited as you imagine. Our faculty have a fair amount of freedom to innovate in their courses. Our nutrition course will feature some fascinating guest speakers, the business course is experimenting with small group projects, and the course focusing on online gaming will be, I think, unlike anything that’s run on Coursera before.

The Coursera platform itself is somewhat limiting–it doesn’t support small groups, for instance–but all platforms have their limitations, third-party or otherwise.

I love the model that Ed Ayers describes. In fact, just yesterday I tweeted a few ideas for digital humanities MOOCs in which students participated in crowdsourced research projects. I’d love to see faculty experiment in that direction, with or without Coursera.

We should be treating it like publishing, not teaching: reviewing the materials critically. There’s no excuse, though, for treating them like courses, any more than we should treat an unsupervised student skimming a textbook, ticking off some multiple choice online questions and watching a History Channel miniseries should be treated like someone who actually took a course.