Teaching ‘Literature+’: Digital Humanities Hybrid Courses in the Era of MOOCs

Abstract

One of the debilitating aspects of recent discussions about the use of digital technologies in higher education—whether these discussions occur in university planning contexts or in the wider theatre of media reports and national policy—is that attention to the quality of learning and teaching comes at the very end of a long train of broader topics. This essay takes the opposite tack and explores what would happen if we start with attending to the quality of the learning and teaching experience in a small-scale hybrid digital humanities course and only then widen the gyre of discussion to the larger national and international contexts where it might make sense to talk of all-digital or mostly-digital MOOCs. Doing so means that we must first consider quality in the non-comparative light of the ‘qualities'—the specific properties and attributes—of the mixed classroom/digital experience. Only with some directly observable sense of the educational qualities afforded by innovative digital technologies—‘micro-disruptions', they might be called—can we then scale up the discussion to the wider institutional and socioeconomic contexts of online instruction with awareness of the equivalent qualities that will be needed.