The ABCs of MOOCs: what it’s like to enroll

This speaks to a big dilemma for the MOOCs, which will become more apparent as they try to enter the world of credit-bearing classes. Many of the potential economies-of-scale advantages of MOOCs would derive from students working at their own pace _ either faster or slower than the average.

Yet it’s hard to run courses (and protect against cheating) without holding everyone to the same-week-to-week schedule.

Yet the bigger the class, the more students who are either bored or overwhelmed. That was apparent in the student comments; a professional development worker, who clearly understood many of the issues in the class from professional experience, was overwhelmed by the math.

But economics graduate students found the math insultingly boring (I survived it, but was more sympathetic to the development worker).

This problem may eventually be solved with a wider variety of MOOCs tailored to different levels, but then of course you lose the advantages of scale. And all this matters because options to get help are limited.

Unlike the MIT students we occasionally glimpsed in the videos, we couldn’t linger after class, or stop by office hours, to get their questions answered by Dufflo, Banerjee in person.