No one knows just how these massive courses will evolve, but their appeal to a broad audience is unquestioned:retirees in Indiana see them as a route to lifelong learning, students in India as their only lifeline to college-level work.
The professors involved face new challenges. “It was really intimidating at the beginning to do these lectures with no live audience, no sense of who was listening and how they were reacting,” Professor Duneier said. “I talk about things like racial differences in I.Q., Abu Ghraib and public bathrooms, and I worried that my lectures might come across as examples of American ethnocentrism.” Feedback came quickly. When his first lecture went online, students wrote hundreds, then thousands, of comments and questions in online discussion forums — far too many for Professor Duneier to keep up with. But crowd-sourcing technology helped: every student reading the forum could vote questions and comments up or down, allowing him to spot important topics and tailor his lectures to respond.
Professor Duneier has been thrilled. “Within three weeks, I had more feedback on my sociological ideas than I’d had in my whole teaching career,” he said. “I found that there’s no topic so sensitive that it can’t be discussed, civilly, in an international community.”
The online discussion forum spawned many global exchanges. Soon after Professor Duneier talked about social norms, using as his example the lack of public restrooms for street vendors — including an embedded video of New York vendors — students in Hong Kong, India, Russia and elsewhere commented on the situation in their own cities.
- More Here
Check out the Mitchell Duneier's online Sociology class @ Coursera
The professors involved face new challenges. “It was really intimidating at the beginning to do these lectures with no live audience, no sense of who was listening and how they were reacting,” Professor Duneier said. “I talk about things like racial differences in I.Q., Abu Ghraib and public bathrooms, and I worried that my lectures might come across as examples of American ethnocentrism.” Feedback came quickly. When his first lecture went online, students wrote hundreds, then thousands, of comments and questions in online discussion forums — far too many for Professor Duneier to keep up with. But crowd-sourcing technology helped: every student reading the forum could vote questions and comments up or down, allowing him to spot important topics and tailor his lectures to respond.
Professor Duneier has been thrilled. “Within three weeks, I had more feedback on my sociological ideas than I’d had in my whole teaching career,” he said. “I found that there’s no topic so sensitive that it can’t be discussed, civilly, in an international community.”
The online discussion forum spawned many global exchanges. Soon after Professor Duneier talked about social norms, using as his example the lack of public restrooms for street vendors — including an embedded video of New York vendors — students in Hong Kong, India, Russia and elsewhere commented on the situation in their own cities.
- More Here
Check out the Mitchell Duneier's online Sociology class @ Coursera
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