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“There is a huge value in learning with instant feedback,” Dr. Agarwal said. “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant feedback.”

Les Perelman, has drawn national attention several times for putting together nonsense essays that have fooled software grading programs into giving high marks. He has also been highly critical of studies that purport to show that the software compares well to human graders. “My first and greatest objection to the research is that they did not have any valid statistical test comparing the software directly to human graders,” said Mr. Perelman, a retired director of writing and a current researcher at M.I.T.

Two start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, recently founded by Stanford faculty members to create “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, are also committed to automated assessment systems because of the value of instant feedback. “It allows students to get immediate feedback on their work, so that learning turns into a game, with students naturally gravitating toward resubmitting the work until they get it right,” said Daphne Koller, a computer scientist and a founder of Coursera.

Mark D. Shermis, a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, supervised the Hewlett Foundation’s contest on automated essay scoring and wrote a paper about the experiment. In his view, the technology — though imperfect — has a place in educational settings. With increasingly large classes, it is impossible for most teachers to give students meaningful feedback on writing assignments, he said. Plus, he noted, critics of the technology have tended to come from the nation’s best universities, where the level of pedagogy is much better than at most schools. “Often they come from very prestigious institutions where, in fact, they do a much better job of providing feedback than a machine ever could,” Dr. Shermis said. “There seems to be a lack of appreciation of what is actually going on in the real world.”

Back in 2011 the New York Public Library (NYPL) launched What’s on the Menu?, in which members of the public were invited to transcribe the thousands of restaurant menus in the NYPL’s digital collection.

The NYPL decided to crowdsource the menu transcription, allowing anyone with a Web browser to view and transcribe menus. As of this writing, all 16,812 of the available menus have been transcribed!

Imagine a MOOC built on such a crowdsourced transcription project, with tens of thousands of people around the world not only contributing transcriptions, but also moving together through a course in which they learn about the history of food and culture.

See http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-platform/ The original MOOCs were very much a digital humanities triumph. Institutions have since co-opted the name but not the actual practices. It is important to distinguish between the connectivist MOOC or cMOOC and the institutional brand xMOOC. Probably the easiest illustration of the difference is that in an xMOOC you watch a video, in a cMOOC you create a video.

I think we need to begin with the understanding that MOOCs (DH-focused or otherwise) are not replacements for existing f2f and online courses.

My goal with my upcoming MOOC, “Human Evolution: Past and Future”, is to build in exactly the kind of collaborative, participatory research you suggest. In our case, we will have students collect some measurement data, and probably some data on the foods they eat for a given day. In a class of 200, no big deal — in a global class of maybe 10,000 respondents, that’s big data in anthropology.

Also, using MOOCs as outreach to K12 teachers makes a ton of sense, whether it’s just the teachers participating in the MOOC or both teachers and students. Being proactive about this–not just hoping some teachers somewhere use your MOOC–is very smart.

See also: Kathleen Fitzpatrick on “Neoliberal” http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/blog/neoliberal/ — a good reminder that “to say, for instance, that the university-in-general is a neoliberal institution is to say precisely nothing.”

I love the notion of a “shadow education system”