University Diaries

I've watched the subscriber alerts pile up in my email to the point where I now have close to five hundred students in my MOOC on poetry. Okay, it's not the tens of thousands of people who enroll in Machine Learning. It's not MOOCzilla. But for a close reading of difficult twentieth century poems, it ain't bad.

Inside Higher Ed reports on the predictable growth of MOOCs at America's leading universities, many of whose professors are as interested as UD was when she was approached by Udemy's Faculty Project (her MOOC on poetry is on its way to 250 students from around the world - far short of thousands, but we're just getting started here).

Almost two hundred people watch my poetry lectures now. It's a very global group.

Things do seem to be coming together. I've got well over a hundred students, from around the world, and more and more names, each day, appear in my inbox (when a person enrolls, I get an email). Yesterday I recorded my third lecture, Distinguishing Between Good and Bad Poetry. (You can enroll in the series - it's free - by going here and scrolling down to Poetry.)

The fine blog Not of General Interest asks the right questions about UD's MOOC-mucking, so let's do Part Three of my series on my experience as a lecturer in Udemy's Faculty Project (I've now recorded two talks for Poetry) as a kind of interview.

What's the appeal of a massive open online series of lectures? Why did I agree to do it?

Udemy has asked UD to be part of the second cohort of professors chosen for its Faculty Project . Udemy...

Any book written by a humanities professor defending a traditional liberal arts education had better be well-written and incisively argued. It had better have some verve to it, something original to bring to the table.