I seem to have a special skill for choosing doomed professions.
In my first real job, I was a journalist, writing for Time magazine in London, and each Monday we'd eagerly check out the news stands on the Strand so we could see how our cover stacked up against our chief competitor, Newsweek.
Now Newsweek exists only as a digital ghost, sold yet again, last week, to a new machine, while the magazine's former owner, The Washington Post, has been snapped up by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.
I got out just in time, leaving the newsroom for the classroom while Jeff Bezos still looked like a loveable Muppet rather than a demented bond villain.
Now MOOCs threaten to do to universities what Amazon and Co. did to print. In a previous blog, I suggested that the humanities needed to go local to survive and thrive in the age of MOOCs. Since then, I've taught a Shakespeare class that was essentially an anti-MOOC. It was tiny, rather than massive. It was local rather than global. And we mostly went offline and into the archives, the theatre, and the workshop, to understand how Shakespeare's works continue to live in our communities.
These are my reflections on what happened, what worked, what could be improved, and why such a model will be more necessary than ever once Amazon.edu starts granting degrees.
A little background: I've taught study abroad classes at Cambridge and Oxford, and I always tried to root them deeply in a sense of place, so that we weren't simply transplanting a class from a U.S. campus to a more distant one. As a student, though, I never really had the money to take such trips, and so this summer, I had an idea: what if I offered the equivalent of a study abroad trip right here in Iowa City, where I teach at the University of Iowa? The class would be Shakespeare -- but we would try to study Shakespeare in a way he could only be studied here.
So we read the plays -- but rather than spending all our time in the classroom discussing them, we spent most of our time learning about how they lived in our community. When we read Romeo and Juliet, we took a trip to the University's Center for the Book, where we met Emily Martin, a book artist whose pop-up edition of the play won a prize this summer at the Designer Bookbinders International Competition, hosted by Oxford's Bodleian Library. Emily showed my students how to make a book, and they asked her questions about why she chose Romeo and Juliet, what it meant to her, and how she interpreted certain key moments. When we read The Merchant of Venice, we visited the Iowa Women's Archives, where my students found evidence from the various early 20th century Women's Shakespeare Clubs who had read the play, and how their readings changed before and after World War II. For Hamlet, we held a round table discussion with the director and actors of the local Summer Shakespeare Festival, who were staging the play and who were still working through interpretive issues in their rehearsals. For other plays, we visited Special Collections to look at early editions and fine press republications, and along the way my students made some fantastic discoveries, some entirely unrelated to Shakespeare.
At the library of Salisbury House, in Des Moines, for example, we found a first edition of Newton's Optics, annotated by his contemporary and fellow Royal Society member John Harris.
(courtesy Salisbury House, Des Moines, IA)
The class worked beautifully for keeping the students, and their professor, engaged and inquiring. With finds like the Newton edition, it probably also worked as my most effective integration of research and teaching.
And this was enhanced by collaborative projects, such was a class wiki page where we documented our findings and maintained our bibliography (I pulled these photographs off the Wiki page, where my students had curated them).
(courtesy Salisbury House, Des Moines, IA)
This is also where I saw some room for improvement. In teaching the class again, I would want to make the collaborative class project a larger part of the grade and the focus. But this requires establishing criteria for grading and evaluation that are far outside our normal paradigms. I can usually spot an A paper, or a C, within the first few paragraphs. But evaluating a student's contribution to a wiki page or a visit to the archives is a good deal trickier. Grading, I think, might need to shift to a more holistic portfolio approach -- such as some honors programs have already implemented -- and I'll admit that I'm not exactly sure how that would work. Finally, a class like this really needs to be made anew each year; it is impossible to work from a standard syllabus if you must organize interviews, round table discussions, and artist visits, because even within a single community the available resources will constantly change.
That would be a challenge. But if faculty really are going to argue that what we do can't be replaced by a massive, standardized, computer class, it is probably time to put up or shut up. In short, most of us already do some version of this localized, anti-MOOC teaching every time we lead a robust class discussion. But going forward we will actually probably need to work a lot harder to make sure what happens in our classes really can't happen anywhere else.
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