I just finished Marginal Revolution University's first (and currently only) course, on Development Economics. My thoughts are: there's some pretty interesting content there, and the material itself seems correct & fair. There's no shortage of content, including far more material on India than I expected, and there's many interesting topics.

But the course has teething pains. What problems does it have?

• Video chunks generally make under-use of visual aids; later videos often are really just Cowen or Tabarrok talking but with a generic background hiding them.
• The questions after each segment are very low-quality - I was often able to answer them without even watching the video, but others were just random factoids like an exact percentage for a random paper.
• They name sources and papers for further reading (great!), but fail to actually link them so you would have to manually type down each paper title into Google and maybe find a copy. More than a trivial inconvenience.
• Ordering of videos can be weird: I think quite a few videos appear in the course listing twice, which is both confusing and wastes my time. I must have watched a dozen videos on Amartya Sen...
• There are any number of small errors like questions having the wrong wording or apparently being attached to the wrong video or the completion certificate not being added to profiles. Comments have pointed many of them out, but they don't seem to have been fixed.
• Participation in comment sections is very low, and many of the comments are bad.
• IIRC, material seems to've been marked optional which is not, for example the Solow model math videos were optional but several math questions appear on the final quiz

When MRU was announced, I found myself wondering why MRU is not just being done on Coursera or Udacity or something: are Cowen & Tabarrok's comparative advantages really in setting up a whole new MOOC infrastructure? By the end of the course, I was still thinking this. Hopefully they'll gradually fix the technical issues, provide hyperlinks to further reading & citations, good comments will gradually accrete, the questions after each video will be improved, etc... but why didn't they just start the course somewhere else and focus on content from day 1?

(G+ crosspost)