Over the last few years, few issues involving higher education have generated as much attention as the promise and perils of online learning. \u00a0What catalyzed this reaction was the rise of something known as massive open online courses (MOOCs), which sometimes drew tens of thousands of people from across the globe to free university-level courses offered via streaming video online.<\/p>\n
Dickinson College is not in the MOOC business, but we have been experimenting with online learning. \u00a0Each summer since 2012, the House Divided Project at Dickinson has been partnering with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History<\/a>\u00a0(an organization which focuses on history education and teacher development for K-12 educators) to offer a series of increasingly ambitious online graduate-level classes about the Civil War or Abraham Lincoln.<\/p>\n Before undertaking this online leap, Prof. Pinsker and his undergraduate students at Dickinson provided a careful look at some of the controversies surrounding online learning in higher education. \u00a0Pinsker posed a series of 10 critical questions<\/a>\u00a0at the outset which he hoped their study might answer. \u00a0Then Russ Allen, ’14, helped begin this initiative\u00a0by examining some articles that put the MOOC controversy into historical context<\/a>. \u00a0Leah Miller, ’14, added to the effort at context by reviewing some of the most hyperbolic\u00a0claims<\/a> of MOOC advocates. \u00a0Russ Allen returned to the fray with a fascinating piece about grading practices online <\/a>–a careful dissection of the claims about computer-graded and peer-graded assignments.<\/p>\n But ultimately, the folks at Dickinson decided to try it out for themselves. \u00a0The “Understanding Lincoln” online graduate course is not a MOOC, but it is a hybrid experiment, one that provides some free or low cost open access to auditors alongside full credit and interaction for tuition-paying graduate students. \u00a0Leah Miller provided a telling glimpse inside the first session <\/a>of the first class night in 2013. \u00a0More recently, Prof. Pinsker has offered an overview of the whole experience in this Storify piece.<\/a><\/p>\n All of these short blog posts contain many links and embedded multi-media resources. \u00a0Seminar students don’t need to read them all, but they should try to read deeply enough to appreciate the contours of the debates about online learning and to begin to think about whether their education would be stronger or weaker if part of it moved into cyberspace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the last few years, few issues involving higher education have generated as much attention as the promise and perils of online learning. \u00a0What catalyzed this reaction was the rise of something known as massive open online courses (MOOCs), which sometimes drew tens of thousands of people from across the globe to free university-level courses […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":373,"featured_media":0,"parent":21,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-80","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/seminar-digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/seminar-digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/seminar-digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/seminar-digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/373"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/seminar-digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/seminar-digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/80\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/seminar-digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/seminar-digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}