It only took me 4 weeks to get a little meta–this post is not so much on the topic of transmedia composition and creative writing as it is on considering the philosophy and pedagogy behind two MOOCs on the topic offered through Coursera.
Like millions of people around the world, prior to this semester, I have signed up for MOOCs and then–yeah, nothing. I have had the same reasons for not completing (or even really starting) that everyone has used–work and “real world” tasks had a higher priority, I hadn’t paid for the course so my sense of obligation was low, being in a “class” with thousands of other people and no direct feedback was contrary to my idea of a meaningful educational experience. But for my sabbatical, I was determined to complete at least one MOOC. So far, I completed one, abandoned one, and am working on three more.
What made a successful MOOC for me
The University of New South Wales’s Transmedia Storytelling was a great experience; I came away with more ideas to try, more resources to investigate, more energy about this project. I believe the MOOC was successful because it legitimately offered the following things:
- An anthology of points of view. Each unit centered on a key concept (building a storyworld, planning the user experience, etc), and each unit was “hosted” by a UNSW professor with distinct expertise. Each of the 6 units of the course featured between 10-20 short videos, ranging from 1 to 15 minutes in length; each video developed one idea related to the unit’s main concept with insights from a wide range of professionals and academics from around the world — Henry Jenkins (the godfather of transmedia) contributed a half dozen “mini-lectures” carved out from the extensive interviews and roughly 20 other professionals.
- A focus on the process, not the product. Although the course did ask participants to work on an idea throughout, the assignments focused on the process of creating a transmedia experience–it asked participants to list goals, to think about how different media could be used to complement each other, to plan how to engage different audiences with different media and platforms. It did not ask participants to actually create the product but to engage in the planning/brainstorming process.
- An understanding of the limitations of a MOOC. This is not a college class, and this MOOC did not pretend to be. It was a survey-style introduction to a complex topic that gave the participant a trove of resources to use to learn more–including information about UNSW’s own program where some of these skills can be learned.
What made an unsuccessful MOOC experience for me
The Transmedia Writing course from Michigan State University was a far less successful MOOC (although I know they have an excellent program). To me, the lack of success came from failing to understand the difference between what an instructor can do in a classroom with one or two dozen students and what happens in a MOOC. These things made it less successful (for me):
- One speaker with one set of experiences to draw from. The Michigan State MOOC featured one professor standing (I kid you not) against a white background. He seemed perfectly nice, but it was one guy talking about the basics of writing and story and peer review. He pleaded for participation in peer review almost to an obsessive level, which makes sense as peer review is the only feedback students in this MOOC get (note: you can’t acutally post your work to the boards for feedback without paying the $49 for a certificate, and even then, the feedback you get is from other participants in the class)
- A focus on product over process. The course purported to walk students through three types of transmedia writing — the opening of a novel, the beginning of a screenplay, and a pitch document for a video game. The instruction was more or less “this is what the first chapter of a novel should do–now write a first chapter that follows these rules and post your finished product for others to comment on.”
- Confusion between a MOOC and a college class. This MOOC was attempting to ask more from its participants in 6 weeks than any sane professor would ask from a student in a full semester, but more problematic than that was that the creator was trying to give participants the answer instead of giving them access to tools that would foster curiosity and exploration.
MOOCs & JCCC English
I do not foresee and doubt I would even recommend the creation of a MOOC from the JCCC English program, but as an exercise in brainstorming, I am writing this–If I were going to try to create a MOOC, I would keep these things in mind:
- Create an anthology of voices covering the range of possible things to learn
- Focus on encouraging participants to want to learn more, not in trying to answer a question completely
- Distinguish between the goals of the MOOC and the goals of a traditional class.
All that being said, to create an anthology, the first and most challenging task would be to bribe, blackmail, hypnotize, and cajole my colleagues into participating in the creation of one collective MOOC, perhaps for JCCC’s literature classes — not as a substitute for any of the classes but to promote a love of stories and the desire to get more from literature. The goal would be to encourage thought about what literature is or how it affects us. The course would need to be organized into logical units (perhaps based on genres like prose, poetry, media arts, performance pieces), and colleagues would be pressed into creating short videos to explicate one literary element (character, setting, plot, flashback) or form (sonnet, ode, epic, comedy) by lecturing on one piece of literature they are passionate about. The names of all JCCC lit classes where they could learn more would be heavily featured in the materials along with an extensive list of resources.
That only sounds like a couple of hundred hours worth of work!