This article points to an interesting experiment going on at Harvard to provide online Humanities courses with the dialogue that's so crucial to those subjects. The question will be, is it sustainable to ask alumni to contribute in this way? On the other hand, maybe they'll love it.
"One of the challenges of 'massive open online courses,' or MOOCs, is managing their sheer size, and encouraging thousands of students to engage each other, since they cannot all converse with the professor. Tapping into a deep pool of alumni offers at least a partial way around that problem, one that a few schools have discussed trying," Richard Perez-Pena writes.