I am currently in a bit of an interesting situation regarding my own teaching. For the first time since arriving at Wellesley I am teaching a senior-level seminar (with a focus on personal genomics). By Wellesley standards, the 19 students in the class are actually on the larger end of the spectrum for this kind/level of class. From my perspective, the class is off to a great start in its first four weeks, with students showing a strong level of interest and commitment in the courses’s topics, coming to class prepared with interesting perspectives and questions, and doing the work in and out of class. A few of them have even tweeted about the class (#wcanth314).
At the same time, I am contemplating putting in a proposal to do a course through Wellesley’s new partnership with edX for the 2013-2014 academic year.
The two courses, structurally, could not possibly be more different. In my current seminar, I meet individually with students throughout the semester on a regular basis in addition to in-class time (much of which is devoted to unstructured discussion) and frequent e-mails/course platform conversations. My students are getting to take advantage of the fact that I am a readily available individual resource. Meanwhile, I get to engage in fairly free-flowing, creative teaching–the kind of teaching that not only forces me to critically examine why I think (and teach) what I do, but also opens me up to alternative viewpoints. This is perhaps the biggest single added-value of the small, liberal arts College experience.
If I teach a course through WellesleyX, my enrollment could be in the thousands, or an order of magnitude more than the largest courses I have previously taught (~150). The necessities of production planning for such a course require a precisely planned and structured course, week by week, months in advance. In a topical area open to some subjectivity, like human evolution, this is itself a challenge. But it is also just an extremely different process than planning a more open-ended, partially student-driven, seminar. Done well and successfully, however, it offers the opportunity to reach thousands of students, not at an individual level from my vantage point as instructor, but possibly from the view of a student. If students watch 30 hours of me speaking throughout the semester, they will surely get a pretty good insight into me, even if all I ever see of them is a discussion forum uniquename. Teaching in a massively open environment also opens you up to a level of professional scrutiny different than that of the typical peer review, publication and response system (see this story about a UC-Irvine MOOC).
The two courses cannot in any way be equivalent. They are different on nearly every level, and yet this should not be surprising as their aims, aside from the poorly delimited concept of “teaching,” are quite different. I remain skeptical of what, if anything, Wellesley provides to the arena as a liberal arts institution. But I remain intrigued by the aim to provide not something that stands in for traditional, in-class teaching, but sits complementary to it.
