vp190821 Why take a MOOC-making MOOC? Loneliness of the innovator - 

My dream of teaching 

I’m taking a MOOC in making a MOOC. It’s lonely and sometimes I think it’s pointless. It’s like being in a prison cell, in solitary, and daily they feed you a special formula and you eat it because it’s all there is to eat. And you’re not sure it’s good for you or wasting you.

I feel like writing about it, as though I’m on a therapist’s couch. It’s no wonder. I want to teach, but teaching is outmoded, obsolete and in some cultures in the USA, frowned upon. Especially disliked are new modes of teaching such online learning; these are unwelcome in large educational institutions.

Except those like Harvard, Stanford and MIT where they are less afraid to strike out into untested areas such as Massively Open Online Courses. I’m taking a MOOC so I can measure myself against these kinds of institutions.

These have pooled their resources – including money – to develop MOOCs in their specialties – except in the arts. In Humanities they have developed a few courses, but not in the applied arts such as my field – printmaking.

I am hoping to change this be reinventing printmaking as a technology so that it fits more of the existing MOOCs out there. The fundamental invention is the element of printmaking access, i.e., a press. In my plan, one must have not only a computer and a connection to the Internet, but also access to a press – preferable one designed to complement the MOOC.

My plan goes further than learning how to make an etching for ones’ fun and pleasure. My aim is to take the unheard-of step of pointing to an area of education I care about – STEM. I plan to tweak this by adding Reading and Art to make it STREAM.

There’s more. I want to create a channel for interaction among the people who take the MOOC with a type of social network where they share their work. MOOCs already have forums and other means to exchange images of work and videos, too.

Mine, however, is more specific in that it uses a “moment number” referring to the time and place where the printmaking took place. The intention is to create a virtual world where the highest form of intelligence is the print, date-stamped and including the GIS numbers to give other people a street view of the location where the print originated.

While attention around MOOCs has died down over the past decade, the Coursera company seems to have found a business model for free courses with something it calls Specializations. They’re essentially partial graduate degrees, on the cheap, requiring students to take a series of month-long courses on a focused topic such as data science.

I say, how about printmaking? Although the material is free to anyone to watch, students must pay a fee per course—usually about $70—for a verified certificate proving they successfully worked through it.

I take it further. They must build a press, etch the plate, print the plate (including the paper preparation) and participate in Proximates, the dedicated forum for sharing prints and back stories.

That means these newfangled microdegrees – or Mini MFAs - cost only a few hundred dollars in total.

Beyond that, I take the course to promoting jobs. With this degree, the highest level is the business plan to use the skills (and the press) to start small business selling services such as Sip ‘N Print and Build-A-Press workshops.

But, alas, I’m still in solitary and no one to talk to, no one to share my idea. Back in the days when I was at the UW, I used to find people to tell my ideas to and no matter how wild my ideas were, I usually could find someone to share it with. That was before the ban against new ideas that challenged the leaders’ minds.