I’ve been watching the ETMOOC introductions fly by for about a week now, and am struck by how overwhelming it all is. There are, at last count, 1647 participants in this course, and if everyone posted only once in the past week I would end up with far more than I could ever possibly hope to read.

Online learning, building Personal Learning Networks, and such has that problem with it. I’m on Twitter, but I try to keep the number of people I follow fairly low (presently it’s at about 180) so that I can keep up with them a bit and hopefully learn about about them as people.

I’ve seen other teachers on Twitter follow as many as 5000 people. I have no idea how you can do that and learn anything substantial about the people you follow. One of the people I follow lives in the U.S. Northeast, is passionate about teaching English, and seems to be something of an amateur jazz musician. It’s hard enough to learn about 180 people, could I really learn about and learn from 5000?

MOOCs look great, but I’m starting to think that a smaller scale might be more useful. After all, when you took a course in university, did you feel a greater connection to your prof in the course with 400 first years students, or the 4th year seminar with only 15 people in it?