MOOC: Edutainment

Last year, UC Irvine and Instructure teamed up to create an MOOC (massive open online course) based off of AMC’s The Walking Dead. For those not in the know, MOOCs are part of a “distance education” system, designed to be open and free for all who want to take the online courses whether they attend an university or not.

MOOCs are amazing, and important for the purpose of hybrid pedagogy. According to the open-access journal site of the team of people who created Hybrid Pedagogy, the term can be highlighted in three simple bullet points:

In short, hybrid pedagogy is digital media and technologies being used to further education. It’s almost edutainment- educational entertainment, or entertainment being used to educate. Of course, no educator says that educational technology is perfect; they do, however, like to keep up with the times and take what their students see as fun (television, gaming, social networking) and add an educational twist to it all.

In the case of the TWD MOOC, UCI and its partners that have created the television show-based course aimed to make The Walking Dead educational in terms of applying in-show concepts to real-world issues. The course was titled “Society, Science, Survival: Lessons from AMC’s The Walking Dead”, and was aimed at college freshmen in order for them to take what they learned from the MOOC and connect it to the GE courses they were taking, specifically literature and sociology classes, political sciences, and biology courses.

On the page I linked you to at the top of this entry, Sean Michael Morris, a journalist for the Hybrid Pedagogy site, interviewed one of UCI’s Dean’s, Melissa Loble, about the MOOC. The university created the course to be open to anyone at any time, without final grades, and in hopes that even one student would learn from and come to enjoy the aspects of the class for what it is. UCI worked closely with AMC, acquiring various clips, interviews, etc.; exclusive material only shown to those who took the course. (I would have signed up just for that- TWD is one of my favorite shows!) What they wanted, Loble shared, was to take this networked, participant-driven class and have people be able to apply the fictional world of zombies to medical outbreaks in the real world, and to human psychology as well as the study of political structures. By the end of the course, if a student paid attention and cared, they could reference the concepts of TWD while talking about the current state of Russia, child psychology, disease vaccinations, etc.

I found that hybrid pedagogy, when applied to the concept of MOOCs, refers back to three pieces we’ve read this semester: “The Twitter Essay” (also on the HP journal), and both articles about sponsorship and accumulating literacies by Deborah Brandt. The Twitter entry because it relates back to how we can use social sites and edutainment for learning purposes, and the Brandt pieces because MOOCs seem to be a huge sponsor for education for those who cannot afford college, or those who would rather learn about how pop culture mixes with modern day life, or those who simply like to learn for learning’s sake. It gives them a chance to do so online, without deadlines, without grades, and for no purpose other than to gain knowledge about something intriguing. As for accumulating literacies, isn’t digital pedagogy and using technological tools with progressive applications a new way to accumulate literacy, or education as a whole?