Teaching an online course that 49,000 students have signed up for presents an unprecedented challenge when it comes to an important aspect of instruction: knowing your audience. I could see from my course "dashboard" in Coursera that the students hailed from 190 countries, with 6 percent from India, 31 percent from the United States, and so on, but these numbers only took me so far. I wondered which places had lots of students earning a passing grade? Which places had students who were really engaged with the course? Since I’m a cartographer, it made sense to make some maps.

January 11, 2016 ・ From Chronicle of Higher Education