One of the first things I want to convey about Anthropology 207x (Introduction to Human Evolution) are my goals in putting together the course.
Dissemination
My largest goal for this course is make available valuable teaching content related to human evolution. Evolution, particularly when the subject is humans, remains controversial. Part of this has to do with poor educational resources related to teaching the subject.
This course will be open. This course will be free. This course will provide students with a LOT of information (pictures, videos, maps, discussion, labs, data) related to human evolution and the fossil, archaeological, and genetic records.
Pedagogical Improvement
In addition to teaching Anthropology 207x online this Fall, I will be teaching the same course on campus. Or…kind of the same course. The experience for my on-campus Wellesley students, while they will have access to everything in the Anthropology 207x course, will be quite different. I will use some of the online content in my on-campus course to free up time in class for more discussion. Given the introductory nature of the course, when I teach it, I generally have to do a large amount of lecturing. By flipping much of that lecture, in addition to lab modules, online, we will have more time in class to get into some of the nitty-gritty details of the topic.
I suspect many of these issues will also come up in the Anthropology 207x course, particularly in the discussion forums, though the experience will likely be quite different given the different format. One of the things we will play around with this Fall is using the discussions that take place in my on-campus course to seed discussion topics in the online forums of 207x.
I also think that the process of preparing this course (which, I can assure you, is a considerable amount of work) will, by itself, make me a better instructor for the course, whatever the environment.
Generate Interest in Evolutionary Studies
One of the most enjoyable things about working in the arena of human evolution is that people are generally quite interested in the topic. I have been at numerous unrelated events and dinners where, when my line of work came up in conversation, a nearly endless series of questions began to come my way. I am hopeful that students who take my course, rather than seeing it as an answer to all their questions (though certainly we will try to provide some of those), will instead find themselves wanting to ask and seek out the answers to more evolutionary questions.
One of the fears around the rise of MOOCs is that they will actively undercut the fields, institutions and researchers they represent. I think there are legitimate reasons to share these fears, and I have tried to structure my course in response to them. Anthropology 207x is not offered for credit. Students who successfully complete the course will be offered a certificate of completion, but not credit equivalent to an on-campus course. My hope is that students at other institutions (or, indeed, Wellesley) who experience 207x will be inclined to seek out classes and people related to the topic at their own institutions. I don’t want my course to replace the 200+ other Intro Human Evolution courses that will be taught around the country this Fall, but I do want to increase the pool of people interested in taking those courses.
At this stage, I see MOOCs as a potentially valuable and complementary educational mechanism, but not a replacement one. There is simply no way to create my on-campus seminar course, with 20 students and one me, into an online course with 20,000 students and one me, and expect it to be the same thing. But that is fine, it does not have to be the same thing to be valuable.
Take Advantage of the Properties of a Truly Massive Classroom
My final goal for 207x is to structure the course in such a way as to truly take advantage of the (potentially) massive scale of the course. Teaching about human evolution involves a major focus on teaching about human (and non-human primate) variation. What kind of variation do we see in living humans today? How do we use that picture of variation to test hypotheses about the past? In a classroom of 20 students, even at a place with a fairly diverse student body, the amount of biological (and cultural) variation on display within the class itself is limited. Expanded by a factor of 1000, however, that potential becomes vastly greater.
I will be creating a lot of opportunities in 207x for students to submit basic data about themselves as a way of generating snapshots of what patterns of biological variation look like in a large sample of global humans in a single, virtual, classroom.
