There has been a ton of buzz lately about Udacity. Udacity is a company developed by Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig two other robicists, David Stavins and Mike Sokolsky. They offer Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) on various topics related to robotics and technology to literarily tens of thousands of students per course. This company grew out of Thrun’s and another Stanford professor, Peter Novig’s, courses in Artificial Intelligence at Stanford which they opened to the world as MOOCs. Here’s an article in Wired about it and here’s an article in the New York Times.
As I have noted before, I find this ideas amazingly cool. I even proposed a similar program focusing on humanities classes here at the University of North Dakota. My theory was that classes in the humanities – particularly history – already have a strong following among students who find the topics and stories particularly appealing. After all, we all know the well-worn story about how a series of podcasts on Byzantium attracted worldwide attention. A few meetings with our technology folks convinced me that these courses could be opened to the world without undue strain on our technical resources. Finally, I knew there was a real interest and tradition of outreach on our campus that would eventually allow a program like this to expand. Unfortunately, as happens to so many ideas, my proposal never made it through the university administration.
One of the recurring concerns with MOOCs is that universities are loath to give students free credits for completing the courses. Students who commit the time and energy to the course, however, want some kind of recognition for their efforts. Recently, Udacity has begun to offer certificates of achievement for completing their courses.
As I worked on a proposal for a History 101 class to run in the UND’s new Scale-Up classroom (here and here), I began to wonder whether one approach to giving students a sense of accomplishment for a MOOC would be a collaborative writing project. If a History 101 course introduced students to the basics of historical methodology, grounded that in some basic writing skills, and provided a solid structure for collaborative writing, would it be possible for students to produce a custom textbook for the class? The book writing process would focus student efforts over the course of the semester and produce something of enduring value to the students in the course.
There are obvious issues to my plan ranging from potential copyright problems to course design and the technical aspects of shepherding students through the writing process. One consequence of the large size of most successful MOOCs is that the instructor tends to present content and provide far less day-to-day feedback to individual students. A course centered on something as methodologically complex as writing a textbook, would require a course design that encouraged students to collaborate in a critical way and provide one another with the kind of consistent feedback that would usually come from an individual faculty member. With some trial and error, however, I am pretty convinced that it is possible to overcome this hurdle. After all, sites like Wikipedia have managed to self-police their content and provide a rather remarkable degree of consistency, accuracy, and perspective.
The value in collaborative writing is less in the final product and more in the process. Collaborative writing is a great method to expose students to the diversity of perspectives on the past and to encourage the construction of sound historical arguments. A well-managed MOOC that clearly communicated the core ideas of the historical method could serve as an exciting platform for the collective and collaborative production of knowledge.
