Day 13 (again): Janux at large scale

Just out of curiosity, I enrolled in the Beer course since that is the course that has gotten the most publicity. I figured it would have a lot of students in it, so I would get to see how Janux works scaled up. Well, there are indeed hundreds of people in there... but social? Apparently not.

There is a "What is Beer?" discussion board which has 312 posts in reply to the instructor's prompt... all just in one big list. The posts are not dated (?), but it looks like the oldest posts are at the top because the post at the top of the list has 22 comments in reply; presumably it was first. To see the most recent comments you would have to scroll (and scroll and scroll) on down to the bottom of that list.

And for interactivity? Well, there are 312 comments here. How many have "0 comments" in reply? That would apparently be 297 of them, 95% of the total. (I am basing this on doing a Control-F search in the browser window, since I certainly do not have the patience to scroll through the comments and count them one by one.)

How many have 1 comment? 8
2 comments? 1
3 comments? 4
4 comments? 1
22 comments? 1 (that would be the first/oldest comment at the top)

The crucial problems of how to distribute activity throughout a large discussion board is a topic that many online educators have discussed, and there are various solutions. It doesn't appear that Janux has taken any of that into account. At least Kerry is urging people to comment on each other's posts in his course design. Here - with 297 out of 312 comments apparently (?) having no interaction - I would guess both the course design and the software are working against the social interaction. I read somewhere that over 5000 people signed up for the open beer course. So, it looks like the usual MOOC hype: lots of people signing up, but hardly anybody participating in the social parts of the class (although they might indeed be watching videos and taking quizzes).