I refer to my free History course, as mentioned before, on line lectured by an prestigious American New England University, in which the lecturer announced that this course has over 85000 participants.

Since I am always a bit skeptical, I thought the poor man – because most threads seemed to be written by few. On December 16th, 2012  a Forum Leaderboard was published and my skeptics confirmed:

13 students wrote 119 threats out of   1297 threads posted, a 11%

In other words, a week before the course is finished out of more than 85000 students 1.5% posted threads. Being fair you have to mention the possibility to comment a thread; assuming a threat received in an average 3 comments from different persons, which not have written a thread in this course, so the course  in this moment had a written attention of 5200 threads/comments, a really poor  6%.

Of course, I do not claim being a historian, also I admit that my knowledge is limited and possibly biased – but I am not a Wikipedian, a referrer of or to sources, a librarian or  a History channel viewer – I try explore and conclude. The outcome of my findings is possibly wrong but I deserve the respect of my fellow students. This paragraph belongs to some my postings, but I also realized this problem in many threads in which I did not participated.

If somebody ask, why this beautiful chronometer ( picture above) adorns this thread, give me the chance to explain. The text book “Worlds together Worlds apart”,a hefty 130,- Dollars posted in Costa Rica has as cover photo a beautiful chronometer, which I envy not having in my collection. But back to the point and build the bridge to my thread “Global History”: without any doubt this instrument was chosen to point to the most important naval discoveries, which was without any doubt the rediscovery of the Americas.  But now the pointer is wrong, it should be the astrolabe of the knighted Martin Beheim. Harris brain wave came 250 years later and in this time was nothing more to discover.

Note: the on line course Think again: How to reason and argue had in 3 weeks 2575 threads