So, I’m at the end of week 2 of my Coursera MOOC on Surviving Disruptive Technologies.

As I wrote before – the content is fine: this week we have looked at what happened to Blockbuster, and compared it with Netflix, with what happened to Borders and compared to Amazon. I guess for me it was interesting to realise that the failure of organisations was not just the disruption caused by the advance of technology, but about how organisations themselves were able to behave and develop (or not, as the case may be).

I’m still shocked at the amount (or rather lack) of use that the discussion boards are getting. Each pair of mini lectures leads to the expectation that participants will engage in online discussion. Maybe it’s the nature of the participants  maybe it’s the subject matter, maybe it’s even the number enrolled, but the biggest discussion thread for this week had 54 posts. Compare that with #edcmooc, where in week 2 the biggest thread had 240!

There’s also very little happening outside of the course – there was a Google hangout, but there is little evidence of a strident community developing as happened in #edcmooc. This may not be surprising – that course attracted a lot of education professionals, who (and I include myself here) found it a really useful way of developing personal networks.

Anyway -sticking with it for the moment as the subject matter is interesting. Though I might just give in and buy the book.