Why Isn’t the Digital Humanities Community Building Great MOOCs?

In spite of the fact that I’m a mathematician, I’ve been fairly active in the digital humanities (DH) community for a while now. I’m interested in creative and effective uses of educational technology, and, in the humanities, that means tracking what’s happening among the DH community. Many of the examples of educational technology I include in my talks and workshops come from this community, and here at Vanderbilt I’m an active participant in the DH seminar organized by our humanities center.

I offer this to provide some context for the following question:

Why isn’t the digital humanities community producing the most amazing MOOCs around?

MOOCs are massive, open, online courses. Many members of the DH community appreciate and build projects that are massive, open, and online. Why are these DHers not leveraging this expertise to build the most interesting, most creative, and most significant MOOCs that higher education has ever seen? There’s so much energy around MOOCs in higher education today. Why not tap into that energy and show everyone what online education can really do?

Okay, I admit, these questions are mostly rhetorical. I think I know why many in the DH community are hesitant to get involved with MOOCs. The high-profile MOOCs hosted on the Coursera, EdX, and Udacity platforms are seen by many as glorified correspondence courses, not much more than a sequence of lecture videos and a few multiple-choice quizzes. That’s a very different instructional model than the one practiced by most of those in the humanities. Here’s what Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor and chair of media studies at the University of Virginia, said about this concern last summer:

“For the more pedestrian MOOCs, the simple podium lecture captured and released, the difference between a real college course and a MOOC is like the difference between playing golf and watching golf. Both can be exciting and enjoyable. Both can be boring and frustrating. But they are not the same thing.”

The idea of replacing more traditionally taught humanities courses with MOOCs is a hugely risky one. It’s too early in the life cycle of MOOCs to know if they can achieve the same kind of learning outcomes seen in on-campus and (small, closed) online courses. Digital humanists are rightly skeptical of MOOCs as substitutes for these kind of courses. Mills Kelly, whose new book Teaching History in the Digital Age looks fantastic, is such a skeptic, writing the following in a thoughtful blog post last summer about teaching online:

“We should be thinking carefully about how teaching and learning in the digital realm is different. Then, and only then, should we start creating new approaches to teaching and learning. BlackBoard and its ilk won’t help us. MOOCs won’t help us either.”

That was last summer. Just this past January, at the Modern Language Association convention in Boston, Amanda French was quoted as saying, “I don’t know a single digital humanist who likes MOOCs.” That’s significant, since Amanda coordinates THATCamps for George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media–and knows a lot of digital humanists!

I get the concerns about MOOCs replacing more traditionally taught courses, and the implications that such replacements have for the higher education financial model. But since Vanderbilt’s first two MOOCs came online last month, each with about 20,000 active student participants, it’s become clear to me that MOOCs have great potential for expanding the educational missions of colleges and universities. These students aren’t paying tuition and they aren’t earning credit, but they are interested in learning. Such students are already part of our educational missions; think of the high school students and senior adults who participate in programs on our campuses. MOOCs enable us to greatly expand this pool of non-traditional students.

If the digital humanities community were to view MOOCs as ways to expand their institutions’ educational missions, might more DHers be interested in experimenting with MOOCs?

Let’s get practical. Here’s an idea I’ve had kicking around my head for a few months. Back in 2011 the New York Public Library (NYPL) launched What’s on the Menu?, in which members of the public were invited to transcribe the thousands of restaurant menus in the NYPL’s digital collection. These menus, dating back to the 1840s, were stored as images, not text, which made them very hard for scholars to use. Transcribing the menus through optical character recognition (OCR) was problematic, since OCR couldn’t handle the many handwritten menus, nor could it identify structural elements of menus. The NYPL decided to crowdsource the menu transcription, allowing anyone with a Web browser to view and transcribe menus. As of this writing, all 16,812 of the available menus have been transcribed!

Imagine a MOOC built on such a crowdsourced transcription project, with tens of thousands of people around the world not only contributing transcriptions, but also moving together through a course in which they learn about the history of food and culture. The lecture videos and forum discussions would help participants better appreciate the significance of their transcription work, and their transcription work would, in turn, provide concrete experiences with which to make sense of the history they were learning in the course. A digital humanities MOOC designed in this way would lie at the intersection of a university’s teaching, research, and service missions.

There are at least a few people in the digital humanities community who are thinking along these lines. Writing about open, digital scholarship in the humanities, Ed Ayers, president of the University of Richmond and director of a number of influential digital humanities projects, offered this suggestion in a Chronicle piece in February:

“Online courses will be ideal environments to further this kind of scholarship. Thousands of people in a MOOC or a dozen in a small class at a liberal-arts college can collaborate as they find and share new patterns and insights. Students from many backgrounds can contribute to conversations about matters of enduring consequence.”

Will Thomas, history professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and co-director of the History Harvest project, has been planning something along these lines since January:

“Imagine if we reorganized our classroom experience both in large lecture courses and more intensive seminars to create less anonymity and more dynamic learning, to allow students truly to participate in a ‘community of scholars.’ We will be doing precisely this in The History Harvest course soon–at least we are in the planning stages now for a MOOC-like distributed course next year with participating classes from other colleges…”

I’ll end this post with a challenge to the digital humanities community: How can you leverage the attention (and resources) that MOOCs are receiving in higher education today to create a open, online learning experience that involves the public in meaningful, interesting scholarship?

Image: “Washington Crossover,” cta web, Flickr (CC)

18 Responses to "Why Isn’t the Digital Humanities Community Building Great MOOCs?"

Joseph Kurtin says:

April 28, 2013 at 8:21 am

If a major concern is authentic, collaborative learning with a focus on critical analysis, building a MOOC-style conference for digital humanities scholars with the aim of its participants to critically analyze the MOOC form itself might provide an interesting study and simultaneously provide an example of the form to work from. Granted, the idea is a little cheeky and reflexive.

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Derek Bruff says:

April 28, 2013 at 9:22 am

I agree that a MOOC on MOOCs is an interesting idea, and, in fact, I participated in one last fall, the MOOC MOOC. The recent “E-learning and Digital Courses” MOOC from the University of Edinburgh was also something of a MOOC on MOOC.

I’m reminded of courses on social media that use social media tools. They’re often not great test cases for the use of social media in higher education. Sure, you can use social media to teach about social media, but can you use social media to teach chemistry or statistics or history? I think the answer is “yes,” but sharing examples of social media use from courses on social media isn’t usually instructive for instructors in other disciplines.

So I’d rather see a straight-up digital humanities MOOC than another MOOC on MOOCs. That way, we could find out if the idea I propose here can really go somewhere.

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Lynn Ramey says:

April 28, 2013 at 9:40 am

I like the idea and am willing to try it at some point, perhaps soon. Another problem that I see is that digital humanities projects, including the crowd-sourced scholarship MOOC that you are suggesting, tend to rely on large amounts of data. This is not how many of us are trained to think, though historians are likely an exception. For a literature scholar, large amounts of data are not needed, in general, to do the work we do. So this requires a different way of conceiving of our mission and research methods. Some are stepping up to that and others are finding such a radical change in the meaning of scholarship to be too much, or at least uninviting. Ultimately I think both types of scholarship (data-driven and micro-analytical) will be important and will play together productively. This is just a big change for many humanists.

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Glen says:

April 28, 2013 at 9:52 am

See http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-platform/

The original MOOCs were very much a digital humanities triumph. Institutions have since co-opted the name but not the actual practices. It is important to distinguish between the connectivist MOOC or cMOOC and the institutional brand xMOOC. Probably the easiest illustration of the difference is that in an xMOOC you watch a video, in a cMOOC you create a video.

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Derek Bruff says:

April 28, 2013 at 10:11 am

Thanks, Glen. I’m aware of the differences between the original connectivist (cMOOCs) and more recent xMOOCs, and have blogged about those differences. I have a hard time seeing the original cMOOCs as part of the digital humanities, however. Most came from the social sciences (education, in particular) not from the humanities. And while the cMOOCs use a number of tools also used in the digital humanities (blogs, Twitter, and so on), I don’t think they enlisted students to contribute to a central project in quite the same way as a DH crowdsourced project.

ds106 is perhaps a notable exception, in that it has a firm basis in the humanities. Although it involves a different kind of crowdsourcing than the one used by the NYPL in their menu project.

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William Cummings says:

April 28, 2013 at 12:47 pm

Lots of thoughts about this, but lemme start with just one. I think we need to begin with the understanding that MOOCs (DH-focused or otherwise) are not replacements for existing f2f and online courses. Politicians, educators, venture capitalists, journalists, administrators, and probably too many academics need to be clear on this. Figuring out the place of MOOCs (and of course this is an umbrella term for a range of approaches) within the wider landscape of civic life, life-long learning, and education is still a key challenge. But they cannot replace or replicate higher ed in any straightforward manner. So I would join in placing the emphasis on what you term the broader educational missions of educational institutions.

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John Hawks says:

April 28, 2013 at 4:24 pm

My goal with my upcoming MOOC, “Human Evolution: Past and Future”, is to build in exactly the kind of collaborative, participatory research you suggest. In our case, we will have students collect some measurement data, and probably some data on the foods they eat for a given day. In a class of 200, no big deal — in a global class of maybe 10,000 respondents, that’s big data in anthropology.

In future iterations we may be able to get students involved in genetic research. Also, we’re working on ways to get K-12 teachers a certification by carrying out activities in their classes. As we’re thinking about the effort that goes into the MOOC, the best way to justify the experiment is by actually making it research on many levels.

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Corey Davis says:

April 28, 2013 at 9:46 pm

I like very much the idea of creating open course that leverage service learning and crowd sourcing to serve a personal educational goal as well as a greater social good. Social-learning based, like the one proposed here, are only as effective as the instructor’s ability to convey and (and students’ willingness to accept) the cultural and intellectual “good” that comes with opening up a course and ourselves to different kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing.

That’s easier said than done, and it’s easier done in learning situations in which the instructor’s and students’ academic and intellectual credentials – their “knowledge cred” – has already been vetted and verified by people we know or trust, in other words, people with academic credentials from or ties to traditional and, ideally (as is the case with boutique MOOCs), prestigious, brand name colleges and universities.

Without these assurances, i.e., minus a certain level of perceived intellectual and social capital in the “room,” – a lot harder to come by and measure in a course with thousands of strangers – any “good” in terms of educational value that people may get out of MOOCs, especially those mediated by social-learning, is largely unpredictable and in most cases highly dependent on the subject matter. Thus MOOCs that provide training in high-demand, workplace and professional skills are widely believed to offer students and society the most value.

As someone who recognizes the unequivocal value of a liberal arts degree, it’s unfortunate that an educational model that supposedly comes from such liberal beginnings serves mostly to reinforce higher education’s real and perceived rarefied position. What’s more frightening is that that appears to be part of its business model.

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Derek Bruff says:

April 29, 2013 at 9:04 am

@John: Bingo! Your course sounds very exciting. The ability to collect, aggregate, and analyze data from thousands of people around the world is pretty amazing. And having students make connections between the course material and their daily lives will certainly help students make sense of that course material. I’m curious, do you know yet what kind of technology you’ll use to collect the student data you have in mind?

Also, using MOOCs as outreach to K12 teachers makes a ton of sense, whether it’s just the teachers participating in the MOOC or both teachers and students. Being proactive about this–not just hoping some teachers somewhere use your MOOC–is very smart.

@William: I’m open to the idea that *some* courses could be replaced by MOOCs, but, as I note above, the jury is still out on whether or not that’s a good idea. I worry about universities that are already making plans to replace courses with MOOCs, before any significant research on effectiveness has been done. There’s some potential in incorporating MOOCs into courses, not unlike how we incorporate textbooks into our courses, but that’s pretty new ground, too. MOOCs as outreach works for me, in part, because it’s largely complementary to existing outreach efforts. A MOOC aimed at the general public isn’t replacing something (necessarily, although it might in some cases), which makes such a MOOC less problematic.

@Corey: You make a very good point about the importance of having some level of trust among the learners in a particular learning environment. I think that’s been a big problem with peer assessment in the MOOC context. When I submit an essay for peer grading, I get feedback from a rather arbitrary set of other students in the course, students I don’t know and students I likely won’t “see” again in the course. This is a very different environment from a traditional classroom, in which students might review each other’s work several times over the course of the semester, and that peer review is embedded in a more established environment of mutual respect and trust. I know these environments can be established online, and I’d like to think they can be established at scale. Certainly, I feel a level of trust with the hundreds of people with whom I interact on Twitter. But creating such environments in MOOCs is still an open challenge.

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xMOOC vs. cMOOC - MOOC Pedagogy - Degree of Freedom says:

April 29, 2013 at 9:09 am

[…] of how to make huge scale a positive vs. a negative within massive online classes (check out this article for interesting ideas that are already brewing). But I also expect that sages (or whatever you […]

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Peter Kay says:

April 30, 2013 at 8:24 am

MOOCs are but a subset of edtech -though with all the hype once could believe they are a superset. Humanists are wise to tread carefully into a world where the rhetoric – scale, analytics, disruption, sage v guide, brand extension -is not always in the best interest of the teacher or the student.

Humanities teachers have always deeply engaged with technology as a tool to strengthen students’ understanding and methods of approaching the material. These pedagogical tactics are part of a wider teaching repertoire that all of us who have had an outstanding prof would recognize right away.

Using tech to reach a student where he is in this extremely dynamic world will call on all the improvisational skills and wisdom of front-line teachers, which is why what might seem like “small-ball” from DH innovators is actually hugely important.

Full Disclosure: I work for a publisher, W.W. Norton, in a digital strategy role.

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Corey Davis says:

April 30, 2013 at 11:44 am

@Derek: I also agree that it’s possible to build that level of trust (in others’ knowledge and thinking) in MOOCs. Students’ trust issues aside, I feel like the value of MOOCs – literally, how much their credits and degrees will be – hinges on how the “credentialing market” (some say “monopoly) responds to MOOCs. We already have tiered university systems in higher education. MOOCs will either level the playing (of which I’m less hopeful) or create yet another class of degrees.

@Kay: I agree. I think the most thoughtful, student- and humanity-centered technology uses comes from Digital Humanities. How can I tell? They’re the ones I always tend to bookmark.

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Friday Varia and Quick Hits | The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World says:

May 3, 2013 at 8:23 am

[…] A spirited critique of the spread of for credit MOOCs and some interesting thoughts on why MOOCs have not been adopted by the Digital Humanities project. […]

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Oliver Janoschka says:

May 10, 2013 at 2:43 am

Hello,

there is currently until 23rd of May a very interesting MOOC-fellowship contest in its public voting stage with several submissions that are covering the “digital humanities” field:

https://moocfellowship.org/submissions

So in my perception it might just need new alliances and a bit of additional stimulus to invite professors to experiment more with these forms.

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James Mansfield says:

May 20, 2013 at 9:28 am

it continues to boil down to motivation…

1) if enough people can be persuaded/inspired/motivated that a MOOC (or any kind of educational endeavor) can meet their needs, then those will join one with some significant degree of alacrity;
2) the second step is to maintain inspiration/motivation (which implies alacrity)
So, if you can convince enough that their needs will be met, they will join and participate with some significant degree of alacrity and if you can maintain that, you will eventually have limitless participation which can also be ongoing
therefore….MOOOC (Massive Online Open Ongoing Community(ies))
PS: the ‘non-tech saavies’ will also want in…consider this an opportunity to engage more…local libraries can be set up to bring them into the communities in two ways: 1) simply to dissemminate the information surrounding the issue(s) for which the MOOC was originally envisioned and 2) to persuade them of the importance of being linked in.

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Friday Finds: Stuff I’ve Been Reading Online | the dirigible plum says:

June 7, 2013 at 5:07 am

[…] read a few thought-provoking pieces about MOOCs this week. Derek Bruff asks Why Isn’t the Digital Humanities Community Building Great MOOCs? and suggests that we need to rethink our pedagogy to make a meaningful learning experience out of […]

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John Millman says:

August 12, 2013 at 4:31 pm

I encourage you to open up to the idea that the future of online education should include crowdsourcing the most interesting teachers in the world for a global student audience. Students could come together online and decide what they want to learn and then pick a teacher to teach the course online for several thousand dollars. The creation of new courses would enable teachers already in academia to go around any legal agreements they have with their institutions about sharing course material online.

If you’re not interested in running with this idea, maybe you could put me in touch with a few people who are. Coursera gets its money from the World Bank, so it is agenda-driven. EdX, Minerva, Canvas and Udemy TELL students what they should learn and try to get students to pay for what they MIGHT be interested, We need a better model. We need a software platform and online education forum which puts students around the world in charge of what is taught to them online.

Your feedback is welcome.

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Viewpoint: Making the Most of MOOCs by Gary Miller | eLearning Landscape says:

August 26, 2013 at 3:54 pm

[…] Why Isn’t the Digital Humanities Community Building Great MOOCs? (derekbruff.org) […]

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