#哈佛云端教室:古希腊英雄# 【课程回溯 2013年3月12日】
March 12, 2013
A MESSAGE ABOUT THE COHORTS
Dear participants,
The teaching staff of this course wants it to be a human and humane experience for everyone involved, and also, to the extent that individual participants wish, a social experience that fosters communities of learning around its subject, the ancient Greek hero.
Last night, unfortunately, something happened that was contrary to both of those ideals of ours. Without warning or explanation, many thousands of participants were suddenly moved out of the cohort that they had been part of and in which they had been joining discussion and into another forum.
What happened was this: the software team tried to fix an error that had placed several thousands of you in one forum (Briseis) and the rest in much smaller groups. Their thinking was that the course had not yet started, so that there was no risk. Big mistake.
We need to and are addressing the communication breakdown that caused this to happen, but we also want you to understand two things about our course.
First, we want to have the forums divided into cohorts of about 1000 students so that the staff of readers and mentors can be responsive to you and personally interact with as many of you as possible during the course. If we just had one giant forum, as other HarvardX and edX courses do, that would be next to impossible. The idea is also to make it possible for those who are less willing to engage in online conversation to feel more comfortable about doing so in a relatively smaller group. We don't know if this will work, but we definitely want to try.
Secondly, we need to let you know that we are all -- you as participants and we as staff members -- experimental subjects in this course. Even though it has been taught over many years on various platforms, the course has never been done on a scale like this. We are in adventure mode, and there will be bumps in the road as we and the software mature and develop. This is definitely exciting, but it can also produce breakdowns like this one. For instance, we can anticipate that when the course actually launches tomorrow morning at 5 am EDT, there may be problems with the servers, and the edX site may be unavailable at times. We hope that doesn't happen, and we are doing our best to be proactive and will try to warn you about such problems before they happen, but there will be problems like this, of that we can be sure, from time to time.
We dearly hope you can keep your patience with us as we proceed.
All best wishes,
Greg Nagy and Lenny Muellner