Opinions vary concerning the effectiveness of MOOCs in the humanities. Ian Bogost, a well-known MOOC critic outlines many problems associated with the courses in his contribution to the LA Review of Books’ series “MOOCs and the future of the humanities.”
On the other hand, many professors have found that MOOCs work extremely well in the humanities, even for courses that are primarily discussion based. For example, Al Filreis, who teaches a MOOC on “Modern and Contemporary Poetry” reported that many students find the online course even more personal than courses they took in college.
Jeremy Adelman, a Princeton professor who teaches the MOOC “A History of the World since 1300,” noted in a presentation to the American Council of Learned Societies that he believes there is a great global potential for humanities MOOCs.
A lot of MOOC innovation and development is actually taking place in humanities courses. For example, many humanities MOOCs, like the University of Edinburgh’s “Elearning and Digital Cultures,” experiment with social media to facilitate conversations among students around the world.
Humanities is also where methods for peer assessment and machine grading are actively being tested, revised, and tested again. These methods are by no means perfect, but as edX VP for External Affairs Howard Lurie stated in the same panel as Edelman, MOOCs are still very much in their early days, so it is too soon to draw too many conclusions about them.
MOOCs could boost humanities in a number of ways. First, they can draw massive attention to the subjects (more than 33,000 students enrolled in Filreis’s poetry course).
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