Middlebury College launched its first fully online class, “Years of Upheaval: Diplomacy, War & Social Change, 1919–1945,” on February 13. The class, which is taught by James Jermain Professor Emeritus of Political Economy and International Law Russ Leng, is the latest in a series of technology-based courses at Middlebury, Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey (MIIS), and the language schools.
The class is free of charge and is open to “alumni, parents, and friends of Middlebury.” Invitations to the course were sent out to alumni and parents via email, though anyone who these invites were forwarded to (the “friends of Middlebury”), including a number of current students, are also able to take the course. According to Leng, the decision to limit the class to these groups was done because of copyright issues.
“We use a lot of copyrighted material under the “fair use” provision that allows us to use it for educational purposes for limited audiences,” Leng said in an email. “If the course were simply open to the world, as with a MOOC [Massive Open Online Course], we could have run into legal copyright issues. The copyright holders feel that they completely lose control when their product is suddenly available to everyone in the world online.”
According to Provost Susan Baldridge, who directly oversees the class and who was largely responsible for its creation, the administration initially planned to only offer the class to alumni. The decision to expand the course to parents and friends of Middlebury was made after initial trials of the class met with positive reception. The decision to open up the class to a somewhat broader but still controlled audience was also influenced by a desire to test the college’s technology.
“Alumni were an obvious place to start for us,” Baldridge said. “The class is a sort of online version of the alumni college, an event for alumni at Bread Loaf where alumni can come and take short versions of Middlebury classes. Alums loved that experience, but it is not always easy for alumni to come up to Vermont.”
Because it is fully online, the class is largely lecture-based. However, unlike many MOOCs, the class has an integrated discussion section. In the discussion sections, Leng and alum Frank Sesno ’77 will hold “informal conversations” about the class material. They will also respond to questions from the students that are submitted in an online text-based discussion forum both before and during the discussion sections.
One aspect of the class that makes it unique from more traditional classes at Middlebury is the heavy and seamless integration of numerous types of media, ranging from news clips and battle footage to films and poetry. The diverse nature of course materials has led Leng to say that the class “has enabled me to be a true liberal arts professor.”
“You can begin to deliver content, in a really engaging way by using this kind of original, embedded footage,” Director of Assessment Adela Langrock, the project manager and quality evaluator for the class, said. “For example, when Professor Leng is talking about Churchill [and a speech he delivered], and then we can cut right into watching that speech in the House of Commons. And then Professor Leng comes back and explains how it was received and then we can cut to to news clips of talking to reporters outside the House.”
Another difference between this class and similar classes at the College is the lack of required reading. According to Langrock, this is done to accommodate the students, most of whom are professionals, graduate students, and parents who do not have time to do intensive reading. However, the class includes suggested readings.
“A lot of people, when they get older, start reading certain types of things, they pick up the mysteries and put away the scholarly work,” Langrock said. “The suggested readings may not be the most scholarly work, but they’re well written and good, and students are actually seeking out these resources and reading them.”
The course is an experiment for the College in providing online classes. As Baldridge put it, “part of this is to experiment with these [online learning] technologies and to see how well they will do in the future.” According to Baldridge, the course is one of the first steps in a broader “digital liberal arts initiative” so that any professor who wants to teach an online course or have Middlebury students collaborate with MIIS, Bread Loaf, or language school students will be able to do so.
The experimental nature of the class also contributed to the decision to limit the enrollment in the class. The class’ high current enrollment, over 1000 students, has already caused multiple crashes, according to Langrock and Baldridge.
The college is devoting considerable resources towards overcoming these issues and has made significant improvements since Fall 2014 (when his “Policy Analysis” course was offered), including purchasing equipment and dedicating bandwidth at the college to online classes, according to Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Orion Lewis. However, he notes that some of the technical problems are insurmountable not because of a lack of resources or commitment but because of the “the fragmented and siloed institutional structure that is the historical legacy of two separate institutions, Middlebury and MIIS.”
The initiative for Leng’s class and other partially online classes has largely come from the administration, not from professors. According to Baldridge, the class was proposed by the administration and Leng offered to teach it and developed the curriculum over the past year and through a 2015 J-term course on a similar topic. The initiative for Lewis’ “Policy Analysis” course came from the administration, and while he had more of a role in proposing the Insurgency and Security Policy course, he noted that the hybrid nature of the class stems from the fact that his contract of employment with Middlebury stipulates that he has to teach one hybrid class per year.
