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The "MOOCs and Libraries: Massive Opportunity or Overwhelming Challenge?" event took place 18-19 March at the University of Pennsylvania and was broadcast live online.

A month after the launch, each course already has thousands of enrollments. One of the highest-enrolling classes is Introduction to Art: Concepts & Techniques, with 17,800 students currently enrolled. Anna Divinsky, lead faculty member of the Digital Arts Certificate Program, is instructing the course.

Divinsky’s MOOC will focus on the fundamental theories and techniques of visual arts, and students will be expected to conduct research, complete writing assignments and create their own original works of art. Divinsky said that unlike a traditional class setting, MOOC students will have to be self-directed and learn to rely on each other for feedback instead of continual guidance from an instructor.

However, some of the most interesting and innovative practices in online education have emerged by challenging these very ideas; loosening institutional control of learning outcomes and assessment criteria, shifting from a focus on content delivery to a foregrounding of process, community and learning networks, and working with more exploratory assessment methods – digital and multimodal assignments, peer assessment and group assignments, for example.

It seems at present that sustained and personal engagement on the part of tutors with course participants is impossible in such a context, and Coursera themselves recommend an approach that borders on course automation.

We want to explore how a MOOC pedagogy might work with a construction of the teacher that has an immediacy that can succeed at scale.