Time on MOOCs

From Time Magazine, a sampling of online courses and the way they can leverage what we've learned about learning.... College Is Dead. Long Live College! | TIME.com

Minute 4: Professor Brown asked me a question. “What did the Greeks know?” The video stopped, patiently waiting for me to choose one of the answers, a task that actually required some thought. This happened every three minutes or so, making it difficult for me to check my e-mail or otherwise disengage — even for a minute.
“You got it right!” The satisfaction of correctly answering these questions was surprising. (One MOOC student I met called it “gold-star methadone.”) The questions weren’t easy, either. I got many of them wrong, but I was allowed to keep trying until I got the gold-star fix.
Humans like immediate feedback, which is one reason we like games. Researchers know a lot about how the brain learns, and it’s shocking how rarely that knowledge influences our education system. ...
... Minute 8: Professor Brown explained that Plato had also tried (and failed) to estimate the earth’s circumference. Brown did this by jotting notes on a simple white screen. Like all the other videos in the course, this clip lasted only a few minutes. This too reflects how the brain learns. Studies of college students have shown that they can focus for only 10 to 18 minutes before their minds begin to drift; that’s when their brains need to do something with new information — make a connection or use it to solve a problem.

For any given person, on any given day, as the day goes by the ideal pace of learning changes. No one can predict how that's going to work even for one person, much less make an ideal pace for a group...but maybe self-paced learning (unlike the teaching-machines self-paced learning that I read about in high school, in the 60s) can finally work out.
Or then again, maybe not.