Civil rights historian and award-winning author Taylor Branch is on a mission to make the Civil Rights Movement more prominent in higher education—and he’s teaching a new MOOC on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to do it.
“I’m hoping the Internet technology will open (courses) up at a cheaper cost for students from all over the place to have access to this history,” said Branch, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the newly-released “The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement.”
The 190-page book—a “guided distillation” of Branch’s longer trilogy on the King years—is the basis of a new course Branch is teaching this semester at the University of Baltimore through a small-group honors seminar that is also being offered on a trial basis as a MOOC, or Massive Open Online Course.
Though MOOCs have been all the rage in higher education as of late, the rationale behind the new MLK MOOC, if you will, involves more than just using the power of technology to deliver education more broadly.
“This is an experiment for me,” Branch, who said he only recently learned about MOOCs, told Diverse during a recent interview. “What we’re hoping to test is the possibility that students online would be able to take the course for credit and, if not for credit, for some fee that could make it economically sustainable.”
He added: “I want as diverse a group as possible.”
Branch—who taught a similar course at his alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, although not as a MOOC—said he was surprised to learn then that the university didn’t have a basic course on the Civil Rights Movement.
