Teaching Creative Writing to the World: Showcasing the Liberal Arts in a MOOC Landscape of Business and Tech
Abstract: In partnership with Coursera, over 1.6 million students have enrolled in 21 Wesleyan MOOCs across a diverse curriculum including film, classics, math, economics, and psychology. Most recently, we have launched a Specialization (or sequence of courses) for Creative Writing, a topic that did not exist in the MOOC world previously. Drawing on our reputation for excellence and annual Writer’s Conference, we created a unique design philosophy to bring this intensely personal – and intensely subjective – discipline to a wide audience. In this presentation, we discuss inception, development, launch, and progression of our Specialization, including our metrics for success. We offer suggestions for development of other MOOCs and how to make them stand out in a crowded field that is intently focused on business and technology courses. We contrast this with our other Specialization, data analysis, and discuss how Wesleyan uses the Coursera platform as a showcase for liberal arts.