One of the key problems in the MOOC design (not being flexible enough to allow students to create their own groups).

"Balancing professor innovation with student will

“What derailed the course was her trying to control forming groups,” Morrison told GigaOM. “She was prescriptive.”

From her experience as an educator — and as a student of two other Coursera classes — Morrison said massive online classes (MOOCs) are student-centric, not professor-centric. The online learning environment is entirely different from its offline counterpart and instructors can’t expect a top-down approach to work. In other Coursera classes she’s taken, Morrison said, students have created Facebook groups, organized Google hangouts and formed other online groups not because the instructor told them too, but because they wanted to.

“The whole experience of the MOOC is for students to drive the learning,” she said. “It’s spontaneous.”

From an instructor perspective, the fallout from this class also seems to highlight the need for flexibility and a format that can accommodate massive scale. But as Coursera pushes ahead with plans to enable students to get credit for online classes and fee-based “verified certificates” for those who want to impress potential employers, this incident could raise broader questions about the need for more quality control and oversight.

In a step that could help streamline future classes, Ng said Coursera is starting to request that universities post their content on the site a month before the course starts so that Coursera has adequate time to review the course, provide feedback and make sure it can provide the proper support."