MOOCs bring Hollywood-style concerns to academia

(The Boston Globe, November 02, 2013)

Massive open online courses — known as MOOCs — have been around for years, but recently they have taken off. Mostly free, on topics as wide-ranging as “The History of the World from the 1300s’’ to “Warhol’’ to “Diabetes,’’ the online courses are giving the common person access to elite professors. Along the way, they are bringing Hollywood-style concerns — wardrobe, continuity issues, social media buzz— to the halls of academia. “Now I have to worry about what shirt I’m wearing,” said David Cox, an assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. If he wears a different button-down during the multiple-day process of taping a single segment of the “Fundamentals of Neuroscience,” his shirt appears to “change magically” on camera, he noted.