Class Is In Session!

On Monday the Penn/Wharton online gamification course offered through Coursera began.  I mentioned this game in an earlier post.   Having listened to an interview on NPR about Coursera and the huge course enrollment sizes — 100K students — I decided to enroll in the course.  I wanted to experience an online certificate-granting course that aims to teach tens of thousands of students at a time.

The course uses video lectures to deliver content; students should be able to complete the assignments from watching the video lectures. Each module has several videos that range between six and 17 minutes.  No textbook is assigned, however, optional online materials are provided.  During the videos students are asked to answer a multiple choice question or make a reflection (not an online reflection).  At the end of Week One, students took an multiple choice quiz.  This week’s quiz was only five questions.  All told, I spent about two hours total on Week One.

There is a HUGE discussion forum.  Lots of discussions from which to choose, and there is a wiki.  Navigating and participating in the discussion forums take more time than the course work.

I’ll be sharing some of the links and ideas from the course in future posts.

My initial impression is: So far, so good.