A Princeton Sociology Professor's Online Teaching Experience

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/education/colleges-turn-to-crowd-sourcing-courses.html?_r=0 has the fascinating experience of a Princeton Sociology professor with online teaching. He had taught the "Introduction to Sociology" course 30 times before and recently moved it to a free online course. I find it so nice to see humanities courses go online.

The article covers many interesting points:

• The professor wondering where to focus his gaze while teaching?
• The prof. thinking about how to handle a worldwide student audience without a real idea of what their backgrounds are?
• How crowd-sourcing technology helped the prof. focus on important feedback from the thousands of feedback messages and how he responded to them in his later lectures.
• The key problem of grading so many students being tackled by students themselves using grading criteria designed by the professor.
• The huge feedback gives the professor more feedback on his sociological ideas than he has had in his entire teaching career so far!
• Mid-term and final exams were hand graded. There was plagiarism detected in the mid-term. The prof. detailed rules to avoid plagiarism before final exam and that seemed to have worked.
• Less than 5% of enrolled students completed the course. 40,000 odd students enrolled, 2,200 did the mid-term exam, 1,283 did the final exam.
• But Princeton does not give certificate of completion and that may have not given some students enough reason to take the exam.