The Dangers of Drunken MOOCing

Opening my Inbox today, I found an invitation to take a pre-course questionnaire for a MOOC called “History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education”. The funny thing is that I have no recollection of signing up for this course. It's obviously not spam, since it comes from Duke University, who are giving this course via Coursera, a MOOC platform I have used in the past. In other words, I must have signed up for it then forgotten. So either senility is starting to kick in, or I was drunk at the time. The 'net is full of warnings about drunken texting, but this is the first case I've seen of drunken MOOCing. Still, the course looks like it might be fun to tag along with, and (unlike drunken texting) the worst consequence of drunken MOOCing is that you end up contributing to the depressing statistics on MOOC dropouts. (For the record, I've signed up for 4 MOOCs: two I completed, one I dropped because I thought it was flaky, and one I dropped because it wanted me to “flip” one of my classrooms after the semester had started, so I suppose that was pretty flaky too.)