Professor Stefaan Van den Bogaert, at this rate, you will be lecturing to a virtual lecture hall with more than 25,000 people. Are you nervous?
“Since November, we’ve enrolled an average of just over a thousand people per week, so if that continues, we will actually achieve that number. I prefer not think about it because it is such an abstractly large number. If I try to imagine that number, I picture a middle-sized football stadium. I wouldn’t say I’m nervous, but there’s some healthy pressure: you really have to be good to lecture to so many people.”
The universities of Delft and Leiden have been experimenting with online education for some time, so what exactly is new about your course?
“Ours is part of Coursera, the Stanford platform for online education launched last year. Many prominent universities are taking part, such as Columbia, Princeton and Johns Hopkins. We don’t record whole lectures, but short films lasting about quarter of an hour. Students are guided by means of multiple choice questions, case studies and open questions.”
And who checks the work?
“We provide model answers and the multiple choice questions are checked in a computer system. For the open questions, we use a combination of computer checks based on the model answers and peer review, which means that students check each other’s work.”
Can you earn credits?
“No, but you can get a certificate, but that won’t get you any dispensation for a Law course. Moreover, it’s not officially a course given by Leiden University, but a course offered on the Coursera platform.”
What can you learn?
“It is an introduction to European Law. Many of the students are from outside the EU, so for them it is a first acquaintance. We try to give straightforward explanations about the European Union, how it works and which rights and duties its citizens and businesses can derive from European law.”
Let’s says there is a seventeen-year old participant from Djibouti who turns out to be a legal genius…
“If he or she is interested in studying European Law in Leiden, we have grants available to attract someone like that over here. Our primary purpose is knowledge dissemination, but we also hope that it will inspire people to come and study Law in Leiden.”
If the experiment proves to be popular, what will you do in the future?
“This is a try-out, and I’m the guinea pig, as it were, to see whether Leiden wants to continue with Coursera. If the experiment works, we can see whether we’ll offer any more MOOCS from Leiden in the future. Leiden might decide to become any official partner university of Coursera too, but we need to give at least three 3 MOOCS for that.”
And will there ever be courses for real credits? “That’s more or less what we’re expecting to do. I think there will be a financial model for Coursera one day, with people paying for education. Practically nobody expects everything to be free still in five years’ time. You can hardly expect a lecturer to dedicate his time and effort to a five-month course for nothing.”