Dive Summary:
- Harry McCracker at Time continues to with an experiment where he is taking a massive open online course (MOOC) on gamification from the University of Pennsylvania and Coursera.
- He explains how peer grading works for the course and how he sees students being overly generous to one another with their criticisms.
- McCracken also criticizes how such courses are susceptible to outages and technical glitches that can impact homework deadlines.
From the article:
"... The course has many of the trappings of traditional higher education, but it’s fundamentally different from college in its for-real form. Tens of thousands of people are taking it independently, and largely in solitude. The tangible downsides of failure are insignificant: if you drop out or flub all the homework, you won’t waste any money, hinder your ability to take additional courses or face public humiliation. ..."