Tuesday morning at 9AM (following a minor technical glitch) our Massive Open Online Course launched on Coursera. Epidemics is an 8 week course taught by 8 faculty at CIDD and supported by many others -- instructional designers, illustrators, videographers, and graduate assistants. On launch day we had nearly 30,000 students enrolled and within the first 24 hours we had 2,000 posts in the discussion forum.

The experience has so far been fantastic -- the engagement of the students has been exceptional, the questions they have generated are great, and the level of discourse on the forums has so far been very cordial. The hardest part now is not getting sucked in to trying to answer all the questions on the discussion forum. Thankfully, we have some great students helping to moderate and the MOOC students themselves span a fantastic breadth of experience and have been answering each others questions . . . sometimes better than we'd be able to!