The final enrollment in this free, 10-week noncredit course on modern and contemporary American poetry was 36,523. Contributions to the discussion forums were read (well, viewed) 957,000 times. Video recordings of collaborative close readings of poems were viewed nearly a half million times in ten weeks. The course site remains open for those enrolled for another nine months. Here are some links:
Our first week on Williams’s Paterson we began by constructing a question gallery. First, come up with a question about some key detail of the poem. Second, come up with a quesion about some formal element of the poem. Third, come up with a question about a larger question raised by the poem. Once the questions have been pinned to the wall, used colored post-its to annotate, respond to, and further question the questions.
Wildly over the top, but charming and fascinating: http://bit.ly/Oijddm. ModPo will change the world, she says. I'm heartened by what she says about class, and by this: “Granting access to knowledge to everyone, anywhere in the world, no matter their level of education, or motives for learning, is downright revolutionary” and “I’d call it one of the greatest humanitarian efforts we’ve seen. So when class starts just a few hours from now, Indeed my world will change forever.”
[From a commentary published in Psychology Today:]
Yes it's true I have studied modern poetry before — in the normal small-class setting. Cappucinos and berets optional. At Bennington, at Boston University and Breadloaf. But I've never taken a course taught by a UPenn professor, with a class size of 28,000. And counting.
The class I am about to take, it starts on Monday, is one that is offered by Coursera. And what is Coursera? Coursera is the new world baby. It's an online college (kind of) offering free classes to anyone anywhere. (coursera.com) Classes taught at Stanford, Duke, and obviously UPenn. Top of the line. FOR FREE. That's right. The best things in life are free. If only Abbie Hoffman were still alive to see this. He'd be grinning ear to bearded ear. So would Walt Whitman for that matter. I guess you can tell I'm excited.
I'm not the only one champing at the bit for Coursera’s Modern Poetry class (or ModPo as dubbed by its professor, Al Filreis). Turns out there are over 3000 of us tweeting on Twitter, and getting responses from our teacher! And he's stoked too. A life of the mind has never seemed so connected to the world. I get to read Emily Dickinson and yes Walt Whitman and even John Cage and I get to write essays and takes quizzes and if it all goes well I will get a certificate of completion. It's too soon to say but I'm saying it anyway. This may be the solution for anyone who wants a do-over on choosing a major, or has finally found the time to dig into something they love but could never fit into a “required” courseload, or it may be the solution for those of us who never wanted college to end. Maybe the answer is never finish. Never stop learning. Turn your life into a growing patchwork quilt of classes taken, certificates earned. And who knows? Maybe Coursera will find a way to give out degrees. Crazy? So is talking to your iPhone and getting a response.
A week before the 10-week ModPo course begins (current enrollment, as of this moment: 28,000 people worldwide) several thousand of those in the course are already talking in a Facebook group and on Twitter. We were discussing a poem by Emily Dickinson. People began saying things about the poem that in all my years of reading and teaching it I hadn't thought of. Then I posted this, above (apologies for the enthusiasm).
For further information about the course: link. To enroll, click here. ModPo begins on September 10, 2012, and continues for ten weeks. As of the date of this posting, 24,600 were enrolled. Roughly* half live outside North America.
* We have scant data on enrollees. Once the course begins, we will ask participants to fill out a short (obviously optional) survey and hope to learn why so many are taking the course, where they live, etc.
Screenshot from a video discussion of Ron Silliman’s “Albany” in preparation for “ModPo,” a ten-week course hosted by the University of Pennsylvania and Coursera beginning September 10, 2012.
New article about MOOCs (the “massively open online courses” that have become all the rage this spring and summer — of which I am myself teaching one): link.
When Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein founded PennSound in 2003, one of their impetuses was purely pedagogical. They wanted to make a digital audio archive of free, downloadable files of poets reading their own work and of discussions about poetics available to teachers and learners looking to parse out poetic lineages and differences.
As Al Filreis explains in this 2007 podcast, PennSound is an archive for those seeking to make aesthetic connections between different poetic trends: a site of convergence for the reader (in this case, listener) and the poetic tradition. This makes PennSound a particularly useful resourse for teachers who are looking to demonstrate to their students the relationships between contemporary poetry and earlier poetic movements.
A 2008 publication, Cover without a Record, was created by students and faculty who were part of an experimental year-long seminar co-sponsored by the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) and the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) here at Penn. Cover without a Record works with — plays off, as it were — the then-current Christian Marclay exhibit at the ICA.
ModPo on "The Today Show"
A 6-minute segment on ModPo was aired on The Today Show on Monday morning, December 10. Later it was made available through the MSNBC web site here.