Continuing my series on the top 10 reasons to enroll in Anthropology 207x (Introduction to Human Evolution), which officially begins on May 6th….
Previous entries:
#10 Origin stories are captivating. Scientific origin stories can be unifying.
#9 It’s open and free!
#8 Our evolutionary past informs how we understand human difference today
Reason 7 – You will be sharing the experience with 1000s of others
We are making a big enrollment push in anticipation of next week’s course re-launch. Yesterday alone, more than 1500 learners signed up for 207x, Introduction to Human Evolution. I don’t need to go more than a few dozen names down the list to find people ranging in age from 78 to 18, and home addresses as close as Cambridge, MA, or as far as Egypt, Australia, Hungary, South Africa, and Belize. The first run of 207x had students from more than 120 countries.
207x v1.0 student enrollment
I am of two minds on the “massiveness” of MOOCs. On one hand, it is undeniably exciting. I was anticipating a large set of students during our first run, but even I was taken aback by what that actually looks like in practice. On the other hand, I tend to think the “massiveness” for the sake of massiveness gets overplayed in terms of its importance when it comes to MOOCs. It is fascinating to have a worldwide class–and in a course about human evolution, where human biological variation is the main theme, it has significant pedagogical value–but I firmly believe learning outcomes are at their best when students are personally engaged with a course, its instructors, and their fellow learners.
And this is where my two minds come together. One of the things I tried to encourage in the course’s first run was for learners to seek out other learners and share the experience. That there was a study group for 207x meeting in Bogota, Colombia, and another one in Saskatchewan, Canada, for example, blew me away. Groups of students met up and did museum trips and attended lectures at local institutions. I wrote about this at the time, but the idea that a MOOCs massiveness can facilitate social action and social learning is pretty incredible.
207x is an online course. You can take it on your schedule. But you don’t have to do it alone. This time around I am going to work even harder to try and facilitate those personal connections between students and solicit feedback on those encounters. As one student wrote at the end of our first run:
Don’t tell me that online education is not interactive, not emotional and not personal. I’ve never thought this would be possible in an online course. As a former teacher I loved the interaction in a classroom between students and myself, and this course was close to the real thing.
I couldn’t hope for anything more.
I will have additional updates each day between now and May 6, when the course goes live.
