Reason #4 to enroll in 207x

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
#7 You will be sharing the experience with 1000s of others
#6 Human evolution encompasses a fascinating set of questions, bringing together many different disciplines
#5 Human health lies at the intersection of our evolutionary past and contemporary present

Reason 4 – 207x meets on your time

207x takes time. If you participate fully in the course, it really will take you 4-6 hours a week to complete (more, if you become highly involved in the discussion forums or spend extra time re-watching lectures or reviewing assignments). Over twelve weeks, that is more than 50 hours of time. As a working parent of three, I know that 50 hours is not in any way an insignificant amount of time. I often long for a free 20 minutes in my day to day schedule (I am actually writing this post from a Starbucks parking lot during the warm-up for my daughter’s soccer game).

What makes that 50 hours manageable is that you can spread it out however you would like. The course is not divided into fifty one-hour lectures. Instead, the lecture content for the course is divided across about 166 videos, average about five minutes in length. They are always available to watch, and they are always available to go back and re-watch. They all have searchable, downloadable transcripts, synched to the video, to enable easier review. If you have a particularly busy week and need to take some time off…you can. If you want to spend a weekend binge-taking the course…you can.

All of this is not to say that all strategies for taking the course are likely to lead to the same positive learning outcome. But at least you have the freedom to structure your experience of the course around the realities of your schedule.

This was my first experience with online learning and what a wonderful experience it was. I graduated college with a degree in Anthropology in 1984 and have not been subjected to the rigors of academia since that time. Even with 3 kids, a full time job and a dog that always needed a walk in the middle of my 207X session, I managed to hang on and complete the course, even passing it!! The course you provided, in my opinion, truly set the bar very high. I want to thank Wellesley College for supporting MOOC, Professor Van Arsdale and staff for their excellent work in providing a superior online learning experience.

I will have additional updates each day between now and May 6, when the course goes live.

Enroll in 207x here!

About Adam Van Arsdale

I am biological anthropologist with a specialization in paleoanthropology. My research focuses on the pattern of evolutionary change in humans over the past two million years, with an emphasis on the early evolution and dispersal of our genus, Homo. My work spans a number of areas including comparative anatomy, genetics and demography.
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