Monday, May 27, 2013

Science writing online. Who participates?

Stanford University had an online writing class for science writing autumn semester in 2012 and 11 000 people responded to their pre-course survey. Who were these people taking free online classes at Stanford University in order to improve their writing?

-35% are graduate students; 17% are undergraduates; 22% are research scientists or engineers; 8% are academics/professors; and 3% are professional writers. (The remaining 15% don’t fall in one of these bins.)
-33% are from computer science, engineering, or math; 28% from biology or medicine; 15% from physics, chemistry, or earth science; and 10% from the social sciences. (Another 7% are in other scientific areas; and 7% are non-scientists.)
-69% of you indicated that you intend to participate in all the assignments, including writing papers and editing your peers’ work. 

The information is based on the welcoming note sent out on Mon 1 Oct 2012 8:55 AM CEST (UTC +0200) and available online at coursera.com course homepage.

As you can see most of the people who take the writing classes are professional and well educated. In one of my recent posts at the AppleTree I asked who are the experts in education and did not answer. Perhaps that here provides us with a small hint about MOOC.

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