"One of the primary (supposed) benefits of MOOCs is that they are scalable. They will work just as well with one student or a hundred thousand. Educational opportunities can expand and contract as demand requires. I get the aim, but I'm a skeptic. The perceived scalability of MOOCs seems to rest on two key assumptions: 1) That any individual learner can adapt the instructional experience to their needs. 2) That current technologies used in MOOCs are, in fact, scalable and robust."

"On the first assumption: The two courses I've been exploring are set up in a manner similar to a traditional online course (I love that we've arrived at the point where online courses can be viewed as "traditional"): course goals, schedule, various forms of instructional media, discussion forums, etc. Taking this existing structure and assuming that it can scale to tens of thousands of students seems naive to me. Take the discussion forums, for instance. In just over a week, they are unwieldy and almost incomprehensible. I feel ok about this mess because I am mainly just exploring and I am pretty familiar with online instructional environments--I can fairly quickly assess what I need to pay attention to and what I don't. But, this course would freak my undergrad students out."

"On the second assumption: Granted, I have only explored two MOOCs (with one organization), so I am probably overgeneralizing here, but it seems that the basic infrastrucutre is very similar to what is currently used with more traditional online courses. I don't trust that these technologies are as scalable as advertised. Consider the Coursera course that was shut down after one week because it clearly didn't scale to accommodate its 40,000 students. Ironically, the course was Fundamentals of Online Education. The tools that were being used in the course would likely work very well in a trad online course with a student cap, but in the context of the MOOC they were quickly broken."