Coursera experiments with on-demand model

Coursera began experimenting with open courses, which you can enroll at any time. The first course, designed in this way - Child Nutrition and Cooking . Interestingly, this course does not use the Stanford platform, which Coursera used earlier for all online courses, but it looks completely new.



Deadlines were a useful innovation in MOOCs about relatively simple video lectures with tasks. They motivated to take the course at a certain pace, increasing the likelihood of its completion. Deadlines provided a “general context" of forum discussions. But Coursera research has shown that strict deadlines are useful only to those lucky enough to start the course on time. How many times have you had a situation, that the most interesting course began a month ago, and by joining it you become lagging, and soon you just leave the course? And how often have you dreamed of going through an already-ended MOOC?
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Apparently, there is no forum in the course “Child Nutrition and Cooking”, that is, it’s just a set of video lectures and tests. In the future, Coursera plans to integrate users who enroll for the course at the same time into cohorts. Such users will complete the course together and communicate with each other on the forum. We will probably hear more about this in the future.