The Chronicle of Higher Education
July 8th, 2014
The University of Zurich says it has cleared up the bizarre case of the MOOC that went missing. But the university is offering few clarifying details to the public, which has been left to piece together theories from the university’s statements and from cryptic tweets by the course’s professor about an unspecified experiment he might have been trying to conduct.
As I reported this morning, the content of a massive open online course taught by one of the university’s lecturers, Paul-Olivier Dehaye, vanished last week without explanation, leaving an empty husk on Coursera’s platform. The course, “Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required,” was one week into its planned three-week run when the videos and other course materials disappeared. Coursera officials said Mr. Dehaye, a mathematician, deleted the materials on July 2, and the company has since restored them. But the company’s officials initially were as confused as everyone else.