The course I chose was "Introduction to Physics" on Udacity. While unrelated to my content area, it had the twin virtues of being a topic of interest to me, and of being open in late November. So while it would work with my age group, it would not work in my content area. This is fine by me, since I hope to be of some use to my students even outside language arts.
Pages like this one have obvious bridges to my content area, providing me with yet another unneeded excuse to talk about Homer and Heraclitus.
And while this is a nice diversion into intellectual history, I wonder whether my time would be better spent learning some principles of physics. Perhaps the course designer thought this would be a nice hook into the topic. But this doesn't assess any real knowledge. It assesses how well one was listening to the previous video.
A minor nit to pick here was the constant and distracting use of the smart pen wandering around the screen. On a really nice review page of how to do cross multiplication to convert the old Greek measure of stadia into kilometers was rendered hard to watch because of the constant movement on the screen. The screencaster would do well to take notes on how Paul Anderson deals with writing in such a presentation.
The course could be completed in a matter of hours, which has its merits and perils. Part of this means that the rigor in the course is pretty lacking. Here is an example of one of the assessments:
And one more for edification:
This is hardly assessing concept mastery.
The discussions present a problem I hadn't yet thought of in MOOCs: language barriers. I'm often surprised at the level of informality, by which I really mean grammatical ineptitude, on moodle discussions. And while sifting through comma-spliced sentences and misspelled words is a big enough barrier, imagine someone writing about physics while trying to learn English, or perhaps writing in Portuguese. If discussions are to be part of a MOOC, this seems like a big barrier, but I'm not convinced of the efficacy of MOOC discussions anyway.
If the stated objective of this course is to get some facts about the most basic-level physics history, then this course would succeed. But for learning key concepts and being able to do anything with them, this course does not seem like a good option.
