I just finished the MOOC “The Ancient Greek Hero” taught by professors from Harvard in the edX web site https://www.edx.org/course/harvard-university/cb22x/ancient-greek-hero/563

 The faculty was excellent. The main teacher was Professor Gregory Nagy. He is the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, You could tell he really loved his subject area and wanted students to succeed. 

The course began on March 13, 2013 and was supposed to finish in July but all work was not available until the beginning of August. The final deadline was extended to August 26.

Although the site said there were students from over 150 countries most students seemed to be from English speaking countries and from Greece. There were videos but the edX staff had trouble getting the Closed Captioned text up quickly, which was a problem for the hearing impaired and the non-native-English speakers. Toward the end of the class the students started putting up the text for their classmates.

It seemed to me that most of those who finished the course were older, with degrees, and taking it for personal enrichment.  I would guess about 10% of those who signed up successfully completed and got the certificate.

It was a lot of work. Every week there were readings from primary sources, videos and a textbook. Grading was all multiple choice questions. Among the questions usually there were two answers that were correct but one was more correct than the other. That meant you had to guess what the teacher wanted. I got better in this as I went along.

To me, this was a worthwhile experience and I intend to take more MOOC’s. However, I may never take a class the first time it was offered. The technology lagged far behind the professors, and was not up-to-date