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I doubt my idea is one that has not been discussed in depth, but I am really disappointed that students must use their name or be anonymous, and cannot create a persona. For instance, I have a unique name, and I'm also generally private enough not to have ever subscribed to Facebook. I don't really care about anything I've have posted being traced back to me, but I do care about the reverse. I don't want some low-level HR person doing due diligence to take a shortcut and make a decision based on a regionally unpopular position on some political issue. As such, there are real reasons to use personas, and I believe real reasons to generally minimize exposure of one's identity online. If you later have roles as a public figure, it can be a distraction to have uncontrolled material out there signed with your unique name. When I'm helping another participant in a course struggle through a problem, or asking my own question that to me will later seem dumb, it's easier to use something more unique than 'anonymous' when having a conversation. Otherwise, I could just not ask dumb questions, but if they really aren't dumb at all, then the answer should be easy to find on Google. I could use a pseudonym, an email address not linked to me in any other way, and if really paranoid, I could use the Tor network—but I'm not concerned about taking classes in secret, I simply want to participate as much as possible and as effectively as possible while opting out from contributing to the 'portfolio' of discourse attributed to my real-world identity. It would be naïve to pretend that the student dialogs are not interesting data for anyone to harvest regardless of user term, and that they will not eventually be as indexed and searchable as Markmail or Google's archive of Usenet. Perhaps I'll never even refer to a certificate from a Coursera course I enjoyed, much less feel the need to display it, and I could use a handle rather than my name, but I can't help but suspect that most of the people using 'anonymous' in the forums are doing so for the same reason as me, or even just declining to contribute. I really believe that it would be a great improvement if, like EdX, the name used in forums was different than the name attached to any certificates. And really, being a global program, and considering the attitudes with regard to academic honesty outside of the US, the certificates may not be very meaningful until there are proctored exams anyway. Furthermore I can't imagine how policing abuses by nicknames is any more difficult than people using 'anonymous', they're both linked to an account that is participating (or suspiciously not participating through quizzes and watching videos). |