By DAVE EISENSTADTER, GazetteNet
Long touting its small, seminar-style classes, Smith College is making a foray into the opposite extreme, creating a Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC. The course, “Psychology of Political Activism: Women Changing the World,” will be available in March through the platform edX, run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Smith Professor Lauren Duncan, 50, who developed the class, believes it is not normally taught in a MOOC setting. “Most are ‘how to program’ or ‘calculus’ and have talking heads lecturing,” she said. “We don’t teach that way at Smith normally.” In designing the course, Duncan relied on Smith students who enrolled in her class on the same topic in the spring semester. The students each picked an activist featured in the Sophia Smith Collection in the Smith College archives.
Share on Facebook