After several days of coordination and preparation, we successfully announced the first four Wellesley courses to be offered in WellesleyX, our grand MOOC experiment. They are:

• Introduction to Human Evolution, taught by Adam Van Arsdale, Fall 2013
• Was Alexander Great? The Life, Leadership, and Legacies of History’s Greatest Warrior, taught by Guy Rogers, Spring 2014
• Introduction to Global Sociology, taught by Smitha Radhakrishnan, Fall 2014
• Shakespeare: On the Page and in Performance, taught by Yu Jin Ko, with Diego Arciniegas as a partner teacher, Fall 2014 

You keep hearing about how more and more prestigious institutions are joining the MOOC revolution – edX adds 15 more institutions from all over the world, & Yale joins Coursera. We also hear about the controversies surrounding the decision to license an edX course by San Jose State, Amherst decision not to join edX, and the MOOC discussion freeze at American University. It is natural to have these debates about anything that is disruptive and in fact, it is healthy to debate the pros and cons of such disruptions.

I believe that the process that we carried out at Wellesley regarding online courses, which extends over a year, was a highly consultative process and there was considerable enthusiasm from many faculty to enter into this arena and experiment. They want to find out ways to showcase how teaching and learning takes place in a small liberal arts college through this medium. Our four faculty already have great ideas and our colleagues at edX have been very supportive of these. We also want to increase access to our courses to world-wide audience and in the process help our own faculty and students have access to opinions from a much wider and diverse audience base and encourage serious discussions.

We also believe that this medium, rich in collecting data, will help enhance the teaching and learning experience based on data.

Just with all experiments, the outcomes are not always what one expects. Regardless of the outcome, the experiments always teach us a lot. Many a times, the experiments open up new pathways for further learning and discoveries and sometimes they tell you that you are going down the wrong path and time to reverse, all of which are valuable lessons. This experiment therefore is not any different.

The Human Evolution course will have a virtual lab component. For eg. one lab may be devoted to showing those enrolled in the class how to perform certain measurements of features of a skull that then help the anthropologists to derive useful conclusions about the evolution. Reading about such a process and seeing it being performed are two different things. Hopefully, sometime in the near future, this medium may even provide remote access to the 3-D scanners or other devices that a student in remote areas of Africa or India can operate remotely with someone supervising the actual device – like remote surgery idea. Of course, these kinds of ideas don’t scale well in the MOOC space, but, like many MOOC courses are beginning to do, you can certainly have subsets of students in a MOOC learning differently than the others – the instructor for the Copyright course on edX admits only 500 students through an application process for forming special discussion groups, or the instructor for The Ancient Greek Hero class created several 1000 student discussions groups with each cohort’s discussions being local to them.

The faculty teaching all of our classes are keen on exploring bringing other experts in their respective areas to participate in their classes. The other big question we will explore is, should we consider a synchronous component to these classes, again for a selected group.

And then of course there is the whole question of assessment. How best to use the various assessment tools that edX provides and continues to develop. What are the best ways that our courses should handle short answers and essays?

Well, I told you that this is an experiment and it is exciting! In an experiment, there will be a lot of questions and when we think we found an answer, there will be more questions for which we will seek new answers. We at Wellesley, have four bold & excellent experimenters and there are several others who are interested. We are embarking on an exciting journey that we hope will benefit the students and faculty and the teaching and learning process at a great institution.

I have registered for all classes and looking forward to them. Have you?