Coursera is experimenting with an on-demand model

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



    Deadlines were a useful innovation in MOOCs regarding 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” for forum discussions. But Coursera studies have shown that strict deadlines are only useful for those who are lucky to start the course on time. How many times have you had a situation that an interesting course began a month ago, and joining it you become lagging behind, and soon you just drop the course? And how often did you dream of going through an already over MOOC?

    Apparently, there is no forum in the Child Nutrition and Cooking course yet, that is, it's just a collection of video lectures and tests. In the future, Coursera plans to unite users enrolling in the course at the same time in cohorts. Such users will take a course together and communicate with each other on the forum. We will probably hear more about this in the future.

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