DartmouthX, Dartmouth’s online learning initiative, will offer its first massive open online courses in the humanities this academic year with options in Italian opera and American Renaissance literature.
Starting on Oct. 13, music professor and department chair Steve Swayne will offer “Introduction to Italian Opera,” a six-week MOOC, while English professors James Dobson and Donald Pease will co-teach a course on the American Renaissance in the winter and spring.
“MOOCs have generally been heavily science-focused, and we are transitioning from STEM to humanities MOOCs,” Dobson said.
Swayne already has experience teaching opera at Dartmouth, having taught the corresponding on-campus course five times, incorporating digital elements when possible.
“I’ve made robust use of online resources,” Swayne said. “I provide links to an article, the libretto and the audio of the opera. When the call [for MOOC proposals] went out two years ago I thought, ‘Most of my course is already online, including the exams.’”
While Swayne’s on-campus version of the course offers an introduction to all opera, the MOOC’s six-week timeline and slower pace means it must be limited to Italian opera only.
The American Renaissance course will be presented in two forms — one open to alumni with a Dartmouth-specific focus and the other open to the public with a broader scope.
In the winter, Dobson and Pease will teach an on-campus course titled “The American Renaissance at Dartmouth.” The course will cover 19th century American authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Emily Dickinson, and a MOOC covering roughly the same content will be offered simultaneously for Dartmouth alumni.
Pease and Dobson will teach the same MOOC in the spring, but with open enrollment and a less Dartmouth-specific focus.
DartmouthX is part of EdX, a broader consortium of dozens of universities that offer free MOOCs, though the College offers fewer MOOCs than some other institutions. Whereas DartmouthX currently has three courses listed, Harvard University’s HarvardX has 37.
Joshua Kim, director of digital learning initiatives for the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning, made it clear that the College’s goal with DartmouthX is not to compete directly with other, larger universities.
“Dartmouth is not like Harvard or [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology],” he said. “Our goal is not to educate the world, we’re laser-like focused on improving a liberal-arts model of learning.”
In addition, he added that the College is implementing DartmouthX at “a very slow and deliberate pace,” with about one additional course each term.
DartmouthX has previously offered introductory classes in environmental science and engineering. The courses saw relatively high completion — approximately 1,400 out of 10,000 students enrolled in the environmental science MOOC completed the course, which was double the seven percent national rate of completion for the average MOOC.
Environmental studies professor Andrew Friedland, who taught the MOOC, said he found it to be a useful tool to improve his on-campus teaching.
“It was extremely valuable and I got additional experience in teaching without immediate feedback from students, which taught me how to speak and how to convey information better,” Friedland said.
Friedland now uses video clips in his undergraduate classes and made two additional videos over the summer with members of his creative team from the MOOC.
The College has put out a request for a second round of DartmouthX course proposals, for which there will likely be two course slots, Friedland said.
For this second round, the College will be looking for subjects with relatively few pre-existing MOOCs and which can “show off the range of the liberal arts at Dartmouth,” Kim said.
DartmouthX is “a place where we can experiment and try new things,” Kim said. He added that the results of this experimentation are particularly useful for Dartmouth’s Gateway Initiative, the College’s effort to improve so-called “gateway” courses — generally prerequisites with larger enrollments — by having faculty work with instructional designers, librarians and media specialists.
Professors interviewed emphasized that DartmouthX courses are not equivalent to those offered to undergraduates. While completion of a DartmouthX course allows for the student to receive a verified certificate, it does not count for course credit. Moreover, the shorter timeframe of six to seven weeks for DartmouthX courses and the nature of the part-time students who might take the courses means that significant amounts of content must be omitted from the MOOCs.
Dobson said that there are other reasons for potential online students to be interested in the course offerings. The alumni MOOC on the American Renaissance could draw in students who want to “reconnect with professor Pease and reconnect with Dartmouth,” Dobson said.
Dobson added that the course will incorporate new learning methods, adding that he has a particular interest in “distant reading,” or using crowdsourcing and data-mining to analyze large quantities of text. He said he also hopes to utilize technologies like a tool developed at Harvard that allows thousands of people to annotate certain poems for literary devices. Users can also see the annotations of other students, so that patterns in contributions can be studied.
The Italian opera MOOC will also incorporate technology in the form of animations by Sawyer Broadley ’08 of the College’s Media Production Group, and additional animators at the Cartoon Studies Institute of White River Junction will supplement videos as well.
