The Chronicle: What will the relationship be between the MOOC and the course physically taught here at Duke?
Cathy Davidson: We’ve never done anything like this before. The first two weeks happen at the face-to-face level before the MOOC begins.... My classes are always student-created, I always work with students to create the syllabus [and] the assignments. We do peer grading and contract grading, they’re very experimental classes.
Once the MOOC starts, students will be reading a number of articles and books about the history and future of higher education, and they’ll also be watching the hour-long videos each week as if they were reading a one-hour assignment. But then they will be creating interventions online for the MOOC students as part of their own assignments, the biggest part of which is that they’ll be working in teams to be envisioning what a university could look like if they invent a university from scratch.... And then they will put that up, and the 50,000 MOOC students can edit those in the forums in any way.
After midterms, we’re going to remix the course—it’s all going to be student generated. Students will figure out what they want to do with all the content that they have had from interacting with 50,000 students from around the world and thinking about the future of higher education.
TC: How do you see your course working with the other pieces of the initiative?
CD: The one part that’s very exciting for my face-to-face students is that there’s three other professors—Doris Sommer from Harvard, David Palumbo-Liu from Stanford and Christopher Newfield from the University of California at Santa Barbara. We’re all teaching at the exact same time, and we’re going to be doing Google hangouts so our students can have public conversations. We’re going to be reading each other’s books and having public conversations across the classes.
For me, what would be amazing—and I don’t want to dictate this, because the students should be driving this—would be if the students were doing projects with students at the other universities, and really comparing what different kinds of universities are like and making networks of students...so much of higher education is happening without students putting input into it. It’s your future, it’s not my future...so this is really to have students have an active role in thinking about the kinds of universities they want.
TC: Where does this course fit in the landscape of Duke’s other flipped classrooms, in which students usually watch a video lecture before coming to class and use class time to work on solving problems or team-based learning?
CD: I like to say, why make a classroom flipped when you can make it do cartwheels? In the humanities, we’ve been flipping classrooms since Socrates. Smart people do the reading beforehand and come into class and then discuss it. A humanities class is about that, that’s how you run a humanities class. So I don’t think the flipped classroom is all that exciting. I want to take real knowledge, make real networks and then have real-world changes and real-world transformations. And I want students in leadership roles, not just split-the-work roles but in real leadership roles.
TC: Why is this such an appropriate time to take stock of higher education’s past and start planning for the future?
CD: On April 22, 1993, the Internet went public, and for the first time in human history, anyone who had an idea could communicate that idea to anyone with Internet access. That’s a form of communication that had never existed before and an incredible power. But almost all of our educational institutions were created for the Industrial Age changes, which were mass printing [and] mass education. There’s almost nothing about contemporary education that was created for the world we live in post-1993. It was all created for the 19th and early 20th century. So it’s time to really think about what education should look like to prepare people for the world we’re living in now, a really changed world where nobody knows the economics, the requirements, the skills, the implications. We have not remotely tried to think about an educational system for the world we’re all living in now, and you, as a student, have never lived in another world. So why isn’t it time to change the educational system for the world you’re living in now?
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