Barb, looking forward to seeing the next stage of your visualisations.
I too am sceptical, if not downright critical of courses that offer not much more than what I call "blind-dating-in-the-dark. There are some reasonable alternatives, from 'quad-blogging' onwards. And ModPo (Al Filreis's modern american poetry course) is a great example of what I called "a collaborative conversation which just happens to be taking place in a MOOC".