I’m under the impression profs get little data about individual students from Coursera. Paul said on https://etherpad.mozilla.org/pr8ZtLXODg (small side window for chat, July 3) that he persistently asked Coursera for data (which they didn’t give him) and that he was tracking Tweets and something else. Profs do receive a lot of overview statistics. The Gamification course ends with a statistical discussion. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHie5uuSxOc (His first overview was ten minutes longer with more detail.)

But as to the idea Coursera should take responsibility for vetting course content, that idea shows ignorance of USA law. Coursera is designed as a platform on which others do their thing because if Coursera takes responsibility for content they become the publisher and liable for whatever goes wrong – like all those copyright violation posts and submission plagiarisms by students, each of which raises potential liability for the publisher. If Coursera is just the platform on which other publish, those others (students and profs alike) are liable for their own content and any resulting legal issues.

A platform must always act like a platform, not occasionally take responsibility for content. Do it once, strong risk of being always responsible! Coursera cannot afford enough staff to vet every lecture in every course, every post by every student. It controls quality by relying on quality universities as their source for courses. (I am not a lawyer but I’ve read cases about who is a platform not responsible for what others put on it vs who is a publisher responsible for every word anyone puts on it.)

The contract with a university (see sample at http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/400864-coursera-fully-executed-agreement.html ) specifies that Coursera is a platform, and the university “desires” to use that platform for courses the university develops. See the Whereas section. This is careful language.

One can guess Paul wrote a normal sounding course outline, the university said OK, Coursera saw only a proposed course topic from a fine university and nothing in the outline gave a clue what Paul would actually do (which perhaps even he didn’t originally intend.)