Edward Olive via Compfight

We appreciated this essay by the young writer Dorian Rolston on what’s it like to take a humanities MOOC from Coursera…. on the topic of modern poetry of all things. He writes elegantly and thoughtfully about his experience in the online daily version of the Paris Review. His experience sounds overall positive with the course. It begs the question: Will we see more humanities-oriented MOOCs in the future?

Here’s an excerpt… Rolston writes:

Since its inception this spring, Coursera, the interactive online education company founded by Stanford computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, has grown auspiciously—securing collaboration from the Ivy Plus schools and sixteen million dollars in venture capital funding—while its humanities offerings, noticeably, have been stunted. (They account for just twenty or so of over two hundred current course offerings.) Understandably, humanities’ characteristically endless trails of abstraction, revealing no discernible right answers, are poorly suited to the online environment. And before ModPo, it is likely those encountered in the study of Dickinson’s proto-modernism, Ezra Pound’s early imagism, or most Gertrude Stein would have proved no exception.

A sense of having contributed to a radical experiment in higher education crept up on me that night, growing more palpable as the essay deadline passed. Anxiously, my mouse tapped “Refresh” but extracted only a disappointing trickle of other peer evaluations. Although my critic was randomly assigned, judging by the hour it would be a student east of Iran—one logging in from Afghanistan, or India, or China, or Malaysia, maybe even Australia—who, if charged with my essay, had sunlight enough to critique it. Geography affected the relationship between writer and reviewer, potentially widening gaps in language or formal schooling. But I hoped seemingly divisive personal narratives could be transcended, at least if Aristotle was right in thinking that “poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”…

Via The Paris Review