Method and apparatus enabling a case-study approach to online learning

A system configured to offer to a large pool of students a loosely synchronous online course that facilitates student interactions and behavior to emulate a physical case-study classroom, in which course content and student responses are critical to learning, the system comprising:

• a user registration module, configured to divide the large pool of students into cohorts of a smaller number of students, each cohort being a subset of the students;
• course content stored in a computer-readable storage medium, the content being divided into lessons and the content comprising combinations of social, passive, active and adaptive teaching elements and in which the teaching elements include computer rules and logic to specify synchronization points at which students within a cohort are to interact among one another or at which students within a cohort synchronize their individual progression through the course content;
• and
• content selection and scheduling logic that releases lesson content according to a defined schedule so that an individual student may progress through a course relatively independently and at his or her own pace but which prohibits a student from progressing to a subsequent lesson until a defined release date for that lesson so that students with a cohort will synchronize their progress through the course at least at the defined release dates, and that selects content within a lesson in response to an interaction by the student with the content and with other students, so that interactions of a cohort with the content in a lesson influences the selection of subsequent content for the lesson, and in which interactions of a student with the stored content becomes student derived content to be shared with the cohort, such that each student progresses through the course relatively independently and is loosely synchronized at defined points with other students in the same cohort in a manner that emulates student interaction in a physical case-study classroom.