HCI class launches May 28!

HCI class launches May 28! - Email by Scott Klemmer and HCI team
Pasted by Class Central - www.class-central.com


Dear <name>,

Thank you all for your patience. I'm overjoyed to announce the HCI class begins on Monday May 28! The class will last five weeks, wrapping up at the end of June.

I'd like to tell you a little bit about what we have planned. Like many of the other online classes, each week offers a series of short video lectures. These videos have embedded questions to help you make sure you're understanding the material.

I encourage you to participate in our online discussion forum by posting alternative resources, sharing real-world examples that illustrate the ideas presented in lecture, and providing feedback on the course and the assignments.

Each week there will be a project assignment and the quiz. To enable you to work on open-ended projects and learn the design process that we teach in this class, we're introducing something new: peer assessment. Coursera, in collaboration with the HCI team, has built a new software module that will enable you to assess each others work. Not only does this enable us to offer more open-ended projects that I think you'll really enjoy, it also gives you a chance to learn from thinking about others' work, as well as your own. The Web site will have more information about the peer assessment system. For now, there's two important things to know:

1) In order for the logistics to work, the project assignments have a hard deadline. We'll post the assignments as early as we can. So if you have upcoming travel or other scheduling issues, you can submit early. But, the software doesn't have a way for anyone to submit late. Future courses may be more flexible. But for now, understand that the course has hard deadlines, and there's no way for us to make exceptions on this. Period. We know that may cause scheduling problems for some, and apologize in advance. If you've missed a deadline, you can't submit that work anymore, but you can still keep up with the rest of the class content.

2) The HCI class will be the very first online course using this functionality. The development team has worked incredibly hard to produce great software, and they've done a wonderful job. But this is still unquestionably prototype software. And a big experiment in online education. To make this work, we'll need your enthusiasm, help, flexibility, and forgiving attitude. I really hope this will work so that we can share more design classes with students around the world.

Please click here to get started: http://hci-class.org/. Especially if you signed up a while ago, you may need to create a new login and password.

Please also forward this email to your friends who might be interested in HCI or who might just be interested in this new form of online education. And/or send it out on your favorite social networking platform. If you have friends taking the class, I strongly encourage you to form a study group to discuss the material with each other and think about how the ideas in this class might be helpful in your lives. You might even find that it's more fun to watch the videos in a group and discuss your project work with each other.

Creating this material for you is a really exciting adventure for us. I hope that you find this class stimulating and thought provoking,

Scott and the HCI online team