Inside Higher Education
July 8th, 2014
A massive open online course instructor was removed from his own course last week -- or was he? As confusion brews among students in the half-finished, suspended MOOC, some observers are asking if the instructor orchestrated a social experiment without permission -- or a farce.
Paul-Olivier Dehaye’s three-week course, “Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required,” reportedly launched without controversy. Its first week featured the video lectures and forum chatter common to most MOOCs. The course targeted people in higher education who felt “threatened,” “lost” or “unprepared technology-wise,” according to the course description -- a MOOC for MOOC skeptics, in other words.
When students returned for the second week, the forum was closed, and their classmates had vanished along with the course content. The forum is now back online, but Coursera, which hosts the MOOC lists it as inactive -- students can sign up for updates about future sessions and preview some of the content, but it remains effectively closed to outsiders.