How can Coursera be improved?

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Dylan Field

First of all, let me preface this answer by stating the obvious: Coursera is AWESOME. I'm only basing this answer on the Modern Poetry class I'm taking so please take my thoughts with a grain of salt.

1. Peer Assessments could use some work. Right now there is a huge variation in the quality of peer assessments. Everyone from English majors to students learning English as a second language are in the Modern Poetry class. I have no idea how (if) essays are actually being quantitatively evaluated. By default users get email notifications for every forum thread they post to, but I only want email notifications when someone reviews my essay.

2. Build out meetup functionality. At the very least, create different meetup.com accounts for different courses.

3. Google Hangouts integration. How cool would it be to have a study group where I video chat with other random students from the class? (Perhaps you could sign up for a study group beforehand to discuss a reading / lecture.)

4. Better learning profiles. I'd love to click on a user's profile after reading an interesting post on a message board and see their posts across courses / academic interests.

5. Newsfeed - I'm simplifying here, but a lot of the left hand sidebar could be merged into one newsfeed with calendar integration.

6. Elaborating on #4 - learning portfolios could make a lot of sense in the future. Coders have Github, Designers have Dribbble... Students could have Coursera.

But most of all... keep doing what you're doing! I'm a big fan and can't wait to see how the product evolves. Go Coursera!!!

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Leo Polovets

Preface: Coursera and the service it provides are awesome.

Minor suggestions:

• A calendar that shows due dates for assignments and quizzes across all of your courses. If you're signed up for 3-4 classes, it's hard to keep track of what is due and when. Optional email reminders would be a nice touch.
• Consistent times for due dates. Depending on the class, homework might be due at 11:59pm PST, 12:00am PST, 12:00am EST, etc. I've had a few instances where two assignments were due at midnight, except one was due Thursday at 11:59pm and another was due Thursday at 12:00am, and I glossed over the 24-hour difference. This is obviously my fault, but I also can't think of a good reason why the same time of day could not be used for every due date across all classes.
• Consistent, reasonable late policies. Some classes have lenient policies, others have very strict ones. For example, one class penalizes by 50% for up to 1 day late and 75% for up to 2 days late; another class docks 20% per day. As with due dates, I think a consistent policy could be good. For example, maybe all scores are docked by 25% for every day that they're late.

Inconsistency is absolutely fine if justified, but my gut instinct says that the current differences between class policies are due to a lack of defaults.

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Nick Wu

One very specific complaint that I had with regard to one Coursera class I took (Probabilistic Graphical Models) which probably generalizes to other classes relates to the Discussion Forums.

If a staff member posts on a thread, the thread gets marked with a grey box that says "STAFF REPLIED". However, many times, there will be followup questions to the staff response. These questions rarely, if ever, get answered because Coursera currently doesn't have the functionality to see if there are any followup questions that haven't been answered. As a consequence, during that iteration of the class, there were quite a few threads that referred to previous threads and asked for further clarification, clogging the discussion forums and making it unnecessarily difficult to read through all the questions.

Adopting something like the Piazza model of indicating that there are unresolved followup questions would simultaneously make reading discussion forums easier while cleaning them up.

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