I know some people (well two) have become interested in this blog becuase of my involvement in the Coursera course on Gamification. Sadly, I have to inform those two loyal readers that I can take no more...
I now understand that Pennsylvania is an ivy league university because it will send you up the wall...
This clip was the last straw. If you can't see what is wrong with this can I either suggest a DVD box set of "In the Midnight Garden" or that an economist once ran off with your partner.
The course are videos of Professor Werbach as a talking head. He puts in quips, which seem to go down well with students on the fora, but I can't help thinking it is like a speak-your-weight machine ploughing through material they are not completely familiar with.
How did the clip linked above get said in the first place? How did it survive quality assurance? I would suspect the answers are "Prof Werbach is saying words he doesn't understand" and "there is no quality assurance".
I suppose that what he was trying to say is that "economic theory suggests people are indiffenrent between losing 50k and a 50% chance of losing 100k", but what he said was miles away form that even with slips of language. But even so, what is this "economic theory" that assumes linear utility curves, which would be lines rather than curves. How can even accoutning students understand CAPM if anyone has ever implied that utility functions are linear? All economic theory, from economics 1 onwards, assumes that people have non-linear utility functions. If this is anything that is being dragged up as a straw man to be ritually immolated, it is not "economic theory", it is naive dcecision theory. And Professor Werbach is so not even close to expressing this cogently...
As a platform Coursera is slightly condensed vapour-ware... the fora are full of students raising technical problems, most signitficantly with acccessing with IE and last weekend the site lost the registrations of all the students, forcing them to re-register. The peer reviewing of coursework is a mess.
God alone knows why the University of Edinburgh are in partnership with this shambles.
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