Tuesday is the first day of Wellesley classes for the Fall 2013 semester. As such, it also marks the first day in Wellesley’s experiment with online education. That experiment is beginning with my course, Anth 207x (Introduction to Human Evolution). 207x does not go live until September 25th, though, so what happens today?
Tuesday marks the first day of my on-campus seminar, Anth 207 (titled Hominid Evolution to help me keep the two straight). 207x will parallel my on-campus course with about a 3.5 week lag, with that lag gradually shrinking to about one week by the end of the term. The two courses are completely separate, but will be operating off the same EdX platform and utilizing most of the same pedagogical resources. So why teach them both?
When I was selected to be Wellesley’s guinea pig in this endeavor, one of my goals was to find ways to productively integrate. I wanted to take advantage of the properties of a Wellesley College seminar to improve the MOOC, and leverage the MOOC to improve the on-campus course.
So here are the steps I took to try and do that:
1) I am using EdX’s courseware platform to create a far more “flipped” classroom for my on-campus seminar. My Hominid Evolution class is geared towards students with little, or in many cases no, background in biological anthropology. This is a necessity given the small size of our department at Wellesley and the course coverage we can provide. As such, when I have taught this class previously, by necessity I have had to do a lot of in-class talking. It is hard to present the fossil record, in detail, without doing this. In order to avoid this, I have spent considerable time the past two months pre-recording video lecture segments for use in both 207 and 207x. These lecture modules, most 5-20 minutes in length, will present most of the basic lecture content of the course (~1-1.5 hours per week). This will free up a lot of time for the on-campus course.
2) I am also using EdX’s courseware to create virtual lab module. I also do not have the teaching support to run a complete lab for my on-campus course. I do this with my forensic anthropology (Anth 209) course, running an osteology lab, but cannot also do it in Anth 207. Access to the EdX platform and the teaching support to get this course ready have given me the opportunity to put together a set of virtual lab modules, adding what I hope will be a very valuable component to my on-campus course.
3. I will, at various points, be capturing in-class activities to create video content for 207x. At the moment, there is almost exactly a 1000:1 ratio between students in 207x and students in my seminar. The smaller environment, the ability to assign and guide students through more complex assignments, and the extended interaction time, all allow for the generation of potentially rich dialogue and engagement between students. I want to capture some of this and use it to seed certain discussions within 207x.
4. I want to leverage the large size of 207x to create teaching content for the seminar course. A classroom with 20 Wellesley College undergraduates can be surprisingly diverse. But that diversity is obviously (size) and structurally (gender, age) limited. One of the great challenges in teaching about the fossil record is getting students to maintain a population variation focus while examining individual fossil specimens scattered in time and space. I am planning on vastly expanding my ability to bring a perspective on what real patterns of biological variation look like in living humans by using the 207x class as a generator of pedagogical materials.
5. Creating a unique forum for alumnae interaction. I have been told Wellesley will be marketing my class with its alumnae network and I hope to enroll a large number of alumnae in 207x. In the long run, I think this is potentially one of the most productive outgrowths of a liberal arts College like Wellesley entering into this realm of educational outreach. Open, online courses become not only a way for alumnae to re-engage with the campus they once occupied, but also share directly in learning experiences with current Wellesley students.
This is a first iteration of this experiment, and I imagine it will require considerable future tweeking, if not substantial rehauls, before it airs for a second time. But for now, I am excited about seeing the first step go forward.
