In The New York Times article Instruction for Masses Knocks Down Campus Walls, Lewin (2012) stated that "in the past few months hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them [MOOCs] as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition or collecting a college degree." According to the same article the current MOOCS are more technically oriented than earlier ones and have computer-graded assignment and exams. The opportunities for social interaction are plenty. For example Artificial Intelligence course of Stanford, taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig included virtual office hours and online discussion forums for students to ask and answer questions and peer assess the value of these contributions.
In this paper we will examine an online task, a collaborative activity set as part of Master's level study. We use methods such as content analysis and interaction analysis to determine the success of the collaborative activity. We then employ Kirschner et al framework for design of online environments to see whether this helps us determine what features are responsible for this success.