emory | When Coursera
first began partnering with top universities to bring MOOCs (massive
open online courses) to a worldwide audience, the enrollment numbers
created a shockwave.
Suddenly, tens of thousands of students were signing up to take a single online class, recalls Kimbi Hagen, one of Emory's early pioneers in the free, not-for-credit online experiment.
Now that Hagen, who is assistant professor in the department of
behavioral sciences and health education at Rollins School of Public
Health and assistant director of Emory's Center for AIDS Research, has
just completed teaching one of Emory's first three MOOCs through
Coursera, she realizes those enrollment numbers don't tell the whole
story.
Of the 18,600 students from 174 countries who initially enrolled in her nine-week Coursera class on AIDS,
some 10,601 actively participated, keeping up with online discussion
forums, essays and quizzes. Untold numbers also signed up to simply
audit the course material.
But through the personal stories that began filtering back, Hagen
realized that her course had a far greater reach than she expected.
The class drew a range of participants, from health professionals and educators to college students and the curious.
One student, who had adopted four HIV-positive children, took the
course to "learn to be the best parent and support person possible." A
high school teacher, alarmed at the number of HIV-positive students at
her school, sought "the right information" to share with sexually active
adolescents. Another never had the courage to reveal his HIV-positive
status to family and co-workers before taking the class.
All told, it was a vibrant, engaged community eager to discuss what they were learning, through online forums and beyond.
"There were many situations where people were gathering to watch (the
online course), be it a village in Nigeria or an athletic team here in
the U.S.," Hagen recalls.
In fact, it wasn't unusual to hear about efforts to gather an entire
village, Peace Corps team or hospital staff to share and discuss her
video, says Hagen, who jokes that MOOC could just as easily stand for
"Maximizing Outreach to Outsider Communities."
Hagen recalls a Muslim student living in an Islamic country (she
prefers to protect the location) who "would watch the videos and go from
village to village to share with other women what she'd learned."
Going into the Coursera experiment, Hagen had no idea of its full
potential. But observing students embrace the topic and become educators
themselves, dispersing their knowledge to others -- for a teacher, she
says, it doesn't get much better.
"This is easily one of the most significant things I've ever done in my entire life," Hagen says.
"And it's absolutely what the Rollins School of Public Health exists to do, what public health is really all about."
