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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

There's really no "right" answer to how asynchronous courses should be. On the one hand, if you just open things up, make some videos available, maybe some machinery for auto-grading where appropriate, I'm not sure you can meaningfully call that material a MOOC at that point. It's some YouTube videos with an associated website of which there are already many for all sorts of content.

On the other hand, if you run things on a tight schedule, real life will get in the way for a lot of people in that many of the better courses are fairly significant time commitments.

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>There's really no "right" answer to how asynchronous courses should be.

Sure, but given Coursera's popularity it seems to be doing something right.

>On the other hand, if you run things on a tight schedule, real life will get in the way for a lot of people in that many of the better courses are fairly significant time commitments.

But is it? The time commitments are watching few videos, learning and doing the assignments, all of this in a week. I think it's enough even for people working full time. If you don't have enough time on your hands to do all this, I'd argue you don't have the time required to complete the course.

Furthermore having time constraints is very important for students to keep on track.

I don't really disagree. As I said, if you take away all the constraints, what's unique about Coursera or any other MOOC, really?

That said, people with busy schedules, travel, etc. can easily get behind on a more time-consuming course and, at that point, the natural reaction is just to drop it.

My personal preference is to have structure but to build sufficient wiggle-room in that someone can catch up a week or two.

Can't remember exactly which courses, but there were some which dropped off your lowest assignment grade. Of course one could argue that it isn't really about the assignment, but still psychologically, I felt that was a good compromise between maintaining the balance between flexibility and continuity.

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