Want to help me crowdsource a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)?
A MOOC is a free-for-everyone college course that doesn't actually offer college transcript credit, but it's open to the public and completely free.
Together we'll go through the whole process. I haven't built one yet, but I have permission to offer one of the first from our university (Univ of South Florida) in about 8 months, and I've got a course in mind that I've taught before, and which should excite the imagination of the masses: fairy tales, with a particular emphasis on Disney.
I'm going to go ahead and blog my thoughts as I develop this course, in the hopes that it will inspire and assist others going down the same path later, as well as help me harness the skills and experience of any readers who have already blazed this path and want to offer assistance to me.
This isn't really supposed to be about me, but I'll mention in brief that I'm the director of USF's teaching center, hold a Ph.D. in German Literature, and have taught fairy tales many times before. The Disney connection is a personal interest, since I worked for Disneyland for 15 years long ago, and now write popular blogs as well as publish independent books about the Disney theme parks. More about my academic life can be seen here.
My plan is to mention my goals, my worries, my obstacles, and my workarounds as I navigate through the waters on building my first MOOC. Everything from finding appropriate activities to dealing with copyright. From choosing things that can "scale up" to a large audience to balancing workload on the grading end. And dozen other such topics.
Oh, and did I mention that it's a gamified course, with principles from video games added in many analog (some manual) ways to enhance engagement?
I figured that I couldn't realistically be a teaching center director who advocated active learning without also walking the talk, so the class is also a "flipped classroom" where content delivery is done more as homework than as primary class time -- though in an online environment without a synchronous component, in a way all online classes are flipped. But I'm keeping with the term. For F2F courses, a flipped classroom means a focus on interactions and practice, and THAT'S the part I want to highlight even in my online class.
Thus, this is a real "kitchen sink" class: a crowdsourced, flipped, gamified MOOC on fairy tales.
I'll unpack the goals and projected bottlenecks one at a time in future posts. For today, let's just start at the beginning: what to call it?
In the past, I've used "Romantic Fairy Tales" and "Fairy Tales From Grimms to Disney." The course focuses on European fairy tales (not those of all cultures) and avoids the folklorist approach for the most part (not as much emphasis on Joseph Campbell and universal human storytelling, and more focus on why THIS author changed the story in THIS fashion).
My first thought is to emphasize the Disney angle, as this will have widest appeal. How about: "Disney's Fairy Tales and Their Sources"? We could start each unit by looking at Disney and working backwards, instead of vice versa.
Thoughts?
Kevin
drkevinyee@gmail.com
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