In those agreements, Rock said the content of a course belongs to faculty but the "expression" of that course, which is to say videos of the lectures, belong to the university, which pays for them to be created. Professors also get a stipend for teaching a Coursera course and the chance to share revenue, if there ever is any.

You just start following simple instructions. Of course you slowly escalate to harder and more compelling material, increasing your commitment every step of the way.

The beauty is that every week I get an email that motivates me to learn more about design, and makes it incredibly easy to get started again.

Let me clarify: I want to learn human physiology, but I work at a startup. I’m completely lost in this artificially-imposed schedule. There is no point in trying any more. Forget it.

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.

If they do that, they’ll see that digital learning needs to become much more mobile, personal and social.

mixes short videos and frequent assessments with facilitated group projects, asynchronous collaboration and innovative tools designed specifically to drive participation

Mobile content, then, needs to be “bite-sized,” visually stimulating and interactive.