Dive Summary:
- One week in, Coursera's "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application" crashed, causing students--most of whom were professors, teachers and online education experts--to take to Twitter to express their frustration and amusement with the irony of the situation.
- The course was offered by the Georgia Institute of Technology and many of its problems stem from the use of Google Docs for group discussions, though part of its curriculum was slated to teach those enrolled how to deal with these issues in their own online courses.
- Over the weekend, the instructor, Fatimah Wirth, sent an e-mail to the 41,000 students enrolled to notify them of the course's suspension and assure that they would be informed when it is once again available.
From the article:
Maybe it was inevitable that one of the new massive open online courses would crash. After all, MOOCs are being launched with considerable speed, not to mention hype. But MOOC advocates might have preferred the collapse of a course other than the one that was suspended this weekend, one week into instruction: "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application." Technology problems are largely to blame for the course's problems. ...