This is an account of Week 2 and 3 of the MOOC that I am taking, called “A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior.” You can catch my write-up of Week 1 here.
In week 2, which was about money, I watched some of the videos early in the week, but waited until Monday, the deadline, to do the quizzes. This turned out to be a bad idea. I could not remember any of the details from the first videos. This may have been due to the time that had elapsed, but I also remember multitasking while watching the videos. I have a dual-monitor setup, and I put the video on the secondary monitor while I did other work on the primary. Surprise, surprise, I clearly did not absorb the information. I took the test 5 times of the allowed 15 to get up to a score of 19/20. The first few were much lower. I then looked over the readings, scanning for the gist and for keywords. After about 1/2 hour over 5 articles, I took the quiz, and immediately scored 10/11. Good enough. There is a lot of overlap between lecture and reading, and this time I got a little lucky because I knew some of the stuff already.
Retaking quizzes is interesting. You can’t just keep retaking them and choosing the one answer that comes up over and over, which would logically be the right answer. Both the wrong and correct answers change each time you take it. In other words, there are several correct answers just as there are several wrong answers (more than 3) that the software cycles through during retakes. I was struck by the immense amount of work this would take. I would love to do the same thing in courses I teach, but it seems really labor intensive.
For week 3, which was about dishonesty, I plowed through the videos on the last day, and took the test a few times. There is a new flexible deadline, where the hard deadline is Monday and the soft deadline is later in the week. I decided to take advantage of this and take the reading quiz later.I got 22/25 on the lecture quiz in one try, but I simply did not have time to read the material nor to take the quiz. I am not sure I will, to be honest (no pun intended). I might skip the week 3 readings and move on to week 4.
Each week, there is about an hour-long video called “Office Hours” where an assistant asks Dan Ariely a series of questions from the week.
Here is the video from Week 2:
I found this one fascinating for several reasons. First, I like how personable and candid Prof. Ariely is in the video. He talks a lot about the price of free, and the fact that this Coursera course is free. He estimates that about 3000 hours went into the making of the videos alone, which I found awe-inspiring. He compared the whole thing to television, which attracts and keeps viewers’ attention through close attention to detail, entertaining products, and, frankly, lots of work. I found it interesting that the model for these videos was television, and not the classroom.
I think the approach is working. I am slacking off more than I might if I had paid for the class or if finishing it actually meant something to me (accreditation, cv line, etc.), but I am sticking with it, and enjoying myself as I learn some pretty cool ideas. Some of the reason I am sticking around has to be the level of entertainment thrown into the mix.
Week 4 is “Labor and Motivation,” which is right up my alley.
