I am certainly not suggesting that MOOCs will supplant books; however I think they could prove to be an interesting means of providing the substance for discussion groups. The article by EUEC member Holly York gives her experience in taking a number of different MOOCs. Although it is certainly possible to take MOOCs completely by oneself as Holly has done for most of hers, I think that it might be more interesting to take them within the context of a group. I hope some of you will try and then report to the rest of us how well the experiment worked.

A number of my plans for EUEC involve members being able to make contact with one another without having to go through the EUEC office. My neighborhood has a very active listserv, and it has proven very helpful; however, there are times when it is also very annoying--such as when there are ten or fifteen emails sent to the list about a topic I care little about. In order to allow members to find others who want to take a certain MOOC course together, I have set up a listserv of members who live in GA. Click the link EUEC-Courses to send an email to that list. (If you don't live in GA, but want to be added to the list, just let me know). The list is moderated, meaning that all emails delivered to the list must be approved. That is to prevent miscellaneous emails being sent to the list and also to make sure that replies are directed to the sender and not to the list. I hope this list will allow members to find other members who want to take a certain MOOC course, perhaps those who live in their area of Georgia for example. If this seems to work well, we can try adding other listservs--please let me have any ideas for what you would like to see.

Last, but by no means least, is the report by John Bugge and Gretchen Schulz on the recent AROHE Conference that the three of us attended. John and Gretchen gave a joint presentation, and I heard superlative evaluations of their talks. Kudos to them and to the rest of you who are helping make EUEC a vibrant organization.  And if you get to the end of their article, Gretchen is quite correct--I would really like to have some volunteers to work on this newsletter!  I want to thank both Gretchen and Herb Benario for helping to proofread this issue--their help is greatly appreciated. 

Also note that there are 2 new links in the left column.  I would like to have a Letters to the Editor part of this newsletter.  Click on the Letters to the Editor link to send an email to emeriti@emory.edu to comment on articles in the newsletter or suggest activities for EUEC or for other information or commentary of interest to other EUEC members.  I want to express my deep gratitude to those of you who have already responded to the fundraising letter sent at the beginning of August.  Your financial support is really important for our functioning.  If you haven't yet made a contribution, you can Click here to donate to be taken to an online form for a contribution to EUEC.  Thank you for your help! 

Changes in Healthcare--Getting your Emory Subsidy contd.

In order to get the $100/month HRA there are basically two steps you need to do: tell One Exchange how to give you the money and tell One Exchange what valid medical expenses you have that add up to at least $100/month.  

For the first part, by far the easiest is to have the money deposited directly into your checking or savings account. Use the One Exchange Direct Deposit Authorization Agreement for that step. For the second part, essentially everyone will be paying their Medicare Part B premium which is usually deducted from your Social Security payment. That premium is more than $100/month so there is no need to document any other expense. Moreover, because that premium is deducted every month, you only need to send the documentation to One Exchange once a year. Use the One Exchange Recurring Premium Reimbursement Request Form for that step. (Note that even if you sign up for a Medigap plan through One Exchange, you would still have to send in a premium reimbursement form each year.)

For step-by-step instructions, you can read the document that Jim Keller prepared.

Anyone in the MOOD for a MOOC? contd. 

In their original conception, it seemed that MOOCs might be suitable for science and math education, but could one really imagine humanities courses being taught via MOOCs? I hope you will read EUEC member Holly York's article elsewhere in this newsletter. She now has extensive experience in taking MOOCs ranging from The History and Future of Higher Education to Les problèmes métaphysiques à l'épreuve de la politique, 1943-1968. Her article gives a good idea of what one might expect in a MOOC and her experience has certainly been positive.

As explained elsewhere in this newsletter, MOOCs are designed so that students anywhere can take a course by themselves as long as they have access to the internet and some device to connect to the internet. The way that students are to interact with others is through the discussion forums that are usually provided as part of a MOOC course. One might view books in the same way, as a method of conveying material from author to reader. The reader is alone and there is in fact no built-in mechanism for a reader to share the experience of reading a book with anyone else. That method works well and all of us have read many books in just that way and enjoyed the experience. However, most of us have at sometime or another been part of a book club in which participants read a book and then discuss the book as a group. Given the right book and the right group, that can be an incredibly enriching experience that greatly adds to the pleasure of reading a book.

Could taking a MOOC together be something like a book club? Usually in a book club, members will read all or parts of a book, and then come together to discuss what they read. With a MOOC, each week there are videos to watch and frequently some additional readings or other assignments. Those activities can be done individually, just as one (usually) reads all or part of a book before the book club meeting. Once a week, those who were taking a MOOC could meet together and discuss the course in any way the group wanted. Read further for how this proposal could work:

What MOOC courses are available?

There are several major MOOC organizations. Two of the best well known are Coursera, through which all Emory MOOCs are delivered, and EdX, through which Harvard,  MIT, and a number of other prominent schools deliver their MOOCs. Most of the MOOC courses begin and end on fixed dates, although there are a few that can begin at any time. The range of courses offered is extremely broad, including Principles of Electric Circuits, Poetry in America: The Poetry of Early New England, courses delivered in languages other than English, and courses that would not seem to be candidates for MOOCs, such as Principles of Written English, Part 1. I have compiled lists of Coursera courses and EdX courses starting in the next few weeks; a full list of courses along with more detailed descriptions can be found by visiting the websites for the two organizations (Coursera and EdX).

How do I take a MOOC?

The process of taking a MOOC is relatively simple. In general, you will need to sign up with an organization such as Coursera, getting a user ID and password (which is free) and then select the course(s) that you would like to take. When the course starts, you will get emails informing you when there is new content. Although there is no cost to take a MOOC, Coursera is a for-profit company and most MOOC providers are building in some type of revenue model. None of the courses offers credit, but a number of courses will offer a "Certificate" that acknowledges completion of the course with some minimum standard of performance on class assignments and quizzes. If you would like a certificate suitable for framing (if you print it out on good quality paper) you can sign up for the certificate instead of the free version and pay the fee. You do not get the fee back if you don't earn the certificate!

How can I find other EUEC members who would be interested in taking the same course that I want to take?

I have created a listserv, EUEC-Courses, to which all EUEC members in GA are subscribed. (Members who live outside GA are welcome to be part of this list--just let me know.) If you are interested in taking a certain MOOC along with other EUEC members, just send an email to EUEC-Courses (EUEC-Courses@listserv.cc.emory.edu) stating what course you would like to take and when and where you might like to meet with others taking the same course. Anyone else in the list can then reply to you. [A technical note: It is important in this case for members to be able to get connected with other members. However, a list with a large number of members (we have over 400 in GA) can quickly get out of control. For this reason, the list is moderated so that SPAM and replies meant to go to a single person do not get sent to the list by mistake.]

When and where should a MOOC discussion group meet?

We will certainly try to arrange for meeting space for any interested groups here at the Luce Center. However, there is no reason that people would have to meet here. There are clusters of our members living all over the metro area. If you wanted, for example, you could invite interested members to meet at your house once a week--that would give members living inconvenient distances from the Luce Center a release from having to travel into Atlanta. If you would be willing to have members meet at your place, just mention that in your initial email to EUEC-Courses.

What Emory MOOCs are offered?

You can see the entire list of Emory-produced MOOCs by clicking here. Note that only 2 of these courses are currently scheduled. It is likely that others will be offered for a second or third time later in the year. Whenever an Emory MOOC is offered, if there are EUEC members who take the course, I will try to get the Emory faculty member(s) teaching the course to meet with our members at the end of the Course. You will note that Pamela Scully and Deb Houry are offering a MOOC on Understanding Violence that begins on September 3. The short synopsis of their course states "Violence is among the top three leading causes of injury and death in the US and globally. We will focus on different disciplinary approaches and perspectives to understanding and potentially preventing violence." A longer description as well as an introductory video is available here. There is also an Emory news article about the course available here.  Pamela has said that she would be delighted to meet with any of our members who take the course to discuss it at the completion. Given that the course is offered by two faculty who hold appointments in the Medical School, School of Public Health, and College, this course promises to be quite interdisciplinary and it might be very interesting to take it with colleagues from different backgrounds.

Summary for those who would like to try out a "MOOC Club"

1)      Look through the lists of upcoming MOOCs that you would be interested in taking and discussing with others:  Coursera Courses, or EdX Courses or other MOOC websites.

2)      Send an email to EUEC-Courses stating your interest in a given course and suggestion for time and place to meet for discussion (probably weekly, but meetings could be less frequent, although most MOOC courses last 4-8 weeks).

3)      If you have a group that at least starts a MOOC, try to find someone in the group who would be willing to write a short article about your experience to share with the rest of EUEC once your course is finished. 

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Those of you who attended our luncheon colloquium in December of 2013, and heard Lynn Zimmerman talk, know what MOOCs are and about Emory's involvement with MOOCs. For the rest of you, MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course. The hallmarks of MOOCs are that they are offered in a completely online format (usually without any credit), they are free, and they can enroll massive numbers of students-sometimes into the tens of thousands at a time. Most MOOC courses are offered for a period of 4-8 weeks, with new modules and assignments appearing each week. Each week, there will usually be several videos to watch spanning a total of approximately an hour, perhaps reading assignments and/or quizzes, and online discussion forums in which students will ask and answer questions or make comments.

There are numerous articles being written on MOOCs and a lot of research is also being done on the effectiveness of education via MOOCs. I will make no attempt to summarize all of the literature, but there are several findings that seem to be true for all MOOC providers: A vast majority of students signing up for a MOOC do not complete the course and many don't even complete the first week. Perhaps surprisingly, the majority of those taking a MOOC have a bachelor's or higher degree. Although it is an appealing idea that MOOCs can allow those without access to quality higher education anywhere in the world to educate themselves, the lack of access to computers and the internet is a substantial barrier to many. It is the case, however, that students all over the world are taking MOOCs. If you are interested, you can read a short article from an August conference on Learning with MOOCs, and one person's opinion about some of the advantages of MOOCs compared to live classes.

It should come as no surprise that the quality of MOOCs varies considerably from course to course, even from the same institution. Emory is providing MOOC courses through the Coursera platform and from the start has put considerable resources into making high-quality courses. There is a Provost's Faculty Advisory Committee on Online Education (FACOE), of which I have been a member from the first, that reviews faculty proposals for Coursera courses and establishes general policies and procedures. In addition, there is a Coursera Support Team using a specially designed production studio with a videographer, course design specialist, and others to help the faculty members design and produce an "Emory-quality" course. If you are interested, you can see the faculty guidelines for preparing a Coursera course and some early comments on the resulting courses here.

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 MOOCs I Have Known, contd.   

Like most of my colleagues who teach languages to college students, I have been an early adopter and avid consumer of new classroom technologies. They continue to transform our discipline and dramatically improve the linguistic and cultural competence of our students, as has been observed both anecdotally and empirically.

My class space became a little corner of France, as students arrived in a room with TV tuned to live French news broadcasts. Since the early 1990s, their papers have been turned in electronically. Initially, they were typed into a server called Babel in the language lab, where professors could load them onto floppy disks and take them home for grading, then return to the lab with the floppies and upload them to Babel so that students could receive their grades and recorded comments. With this marvel, students no longer had to rewrite the whole paper, thus risking more errors, but could simply correct those indicated. Plus there was a "gee whiz" factor that was highly motivating for both students and faculty.

While the "gee whiz" soon gave way to a demand for ever more speed and convenience, things kept getting better and more dependable with smart classrooms and tech support a quick cell phone call away. The technology has become so good, in fact, that there is now some question about the necessity of the classroom itself and the professorial presence.

Enter the Massive Open Online Course. MOOCs have sprung up in a number of different formats and business models, amid much discussion of their effectiveness and more importantly, of what may be lost when there is no face to face classroom presence. Time will tell.

A precursor to MOOCs was The Teaching Company, which offered first on audio cassette, then on CD, a vast catalogue of college lecture courses given by professors who were exceptionally engaging speakers. There was no interaction, no certificate, no credit, but many a long car trip has been made more bearable with this lifelong learning tool. Open Yale is an example of the next step in this format with its menu of online courses that are free and open to the public. The experience is different from The Teaching Company in that Open Yale is accessed by computer and each lecture is a video recording of the professor's actual class, students and all. Reading assignments are included but there is no real time calendar, registration, assessment or interaction. Paul Fry's class on Literary Theory at Open Yale was my first foray into the world of online courses.

As a participant in Emory's Academic Learning Community on the Future of Higher Education in 2013-2014, I became aware of Cathy Davidson's MOOC on The History and Future of Higher Education (Duke), offered on Coursera. Having read Davidson's Now You See It, her work on the impact of electronic media on learning, I decided to register for the course. Registration is free unless you want an official certificate of completion. Even with the free track, you can receive peer feedback, a grade and recognition that you have completed all required assignments.

Because Davidson saw this project as a "meta-MOOC," she and her team made it a point to exploit as many of Coursera's features as they could. The course was being taught on the Duke campus concurrently with the filming. Each week, Davidson and the graduate assistants held real time online office hours. The lectures, in various venues and often featuring interviews with colleagues, were available for viewing at the online student's convenience, with new lectures appearing each week. Locations of the thousands of students were plotted on a world map.

Forums were available to all students with the caution to maintain civility and be mindful of the fact that English was not the first language of many participants. Anyone could start a thread and questions were regularly answered by graduate assistants or Davidson herself.

Two more Coursera offerings, Les problèmes métaphysiques à l'épreuve de la politique, 1943-1968 (Crépon and Worms, l'École normale supérieure) and Marriage and the Movies (Basinger, Wesleyan) followed a similar pattern of lectures and short multiple-choice quizzes and discussion forums, with outside reading and viewing assignments. Absent from these two was the written essay requirement and required peer review. An interesting dynamic of the French course was the number of International students requesting subtitles, in French at first as the professors spoke at a normally rapid pace, then there was a clamor for subtitles in English, which took a bit longer to produce. Another challenge of the French team seems to be the final assessment and awarding of certificates to those qualifying. While the American courses provided these at Internet speed, the French had made no visible progress two months out, much to the consternation of students.

Writers on Writing Poetry was the most successful thus far of the MOOCs I have experienced and illustrates the potential strength of the medium because it is almost entirely based on creative interaction. Its vision is described on the website: http://courses.writinguniversity.org/course/how-writers-write-poetry. The Writing University Open Courses website provides MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) for creative writing through the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, which will offer new opportunities for the study and practice of creative writing and literary analysis to an unlimited number of participants around the world.

The poetry course, while only the second in the series, is well-organized and user-friendly. Each of the two weekly lectures features two different poets/professors and ends with a prompt for a poem illustrating the particular technique in question. For those wishing to have their work considered for workshopping, there is a deadline. Each of the ten moderators runs a workshop on two poems per week, and all are invited to comment. All poems, whether on time or not, are submitted to a forum, where they receive constructive comments from other participants.

In this course, the participants themselves were among the greatest strengths. Among the more than 3000 participants worldwide, a range of skill and experience was represented from award-winning established poets to complete beginners. All came together to be sure that every poem received attention, support and constructive comment. Reading and analyzing the work of others was every bit as useful as writing the poems. Participants formed subgroups by affinity, following the contributions of those they appreciated most. Many of these networks will continue long after the course is over. If the course is offered again, I will sign up, even if the syllabus is unchanged. With different students, it will always be fresh.

But before that, I will take How Writers Write Fiction, ( http://courses.writinguniversity.org/course/how-writers-write-fiction ) beginning September 29 and welcoming new participants every day for the duration of the course. On September 6, I will begin another Coursera offering, Modern American Poetry, ( https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry ) known among its international followers on social media as "ModPo." Al Filreis at the University of Pennsylvania has taught this course in various forms online since 1994 (!) and it has an impressive online presence as well as "meet-ups" in cities around the world. I look forward to seeing how this community works and if learning about something can be as effective as honing a skill.

There is still much to be learned about this system of "information delivery," as education is coming to be seen, in terms of both effectiveness and financial feasibility. All the courses I took were free, while they were undoubtedly costly to produce and maintain. Coursera offers a "Signature Track" where, for a fee, students can have their identity and grades verified so that their certificate may have more credibility. One wonders how long the high quality free offerings can continue, as institutions search for new ways to "monetize" their endeavors. For lifelong learners, it is time to seize the day, while a wealth of offerings is still open.

Dispatches from the Front: Emory at AROHE, contd.

The AROHE Conference was held in Minneapolis August 10-12, where it was hosted by the University of Minnesota at a boutique hotel in the middle of that school's sprawling urban campus.

This international conference afforded about a hundred attendees from the 118 member organizations - all of them retirement organizations for employees of academic institutions in the United States and Canada - the chance to share "best practices" in their programming for retirees. In the words of the Conference Program, "AROHE brings together the talent, knowledge, and experience of retired faculty and staff to improve the quality . . . of their communities and institutions through the creation of new models of retirement."

Of course, one such new model is Emory's own Emeritus College, one of only four such "colleges" in the country. And to show that model in the best possible light, we (John and Gretchen) gave a joint presentation entitled "'School Forever': The Life of the Mind in Emory University's Emeritus College," in which we explained how our programs provide many of the rewards and pleasures of intellectual community that academics too often discover they have left behind upon retiring:   the opportunity to apply for research funding from an endowed Excellence Fund; chances to teach and to share professional expertise with others; recurring opportunities to learn from colleagues in fields far removed from one's own; the chance to enroll in interdisciplinary seminars for more formally organized inquiry into challenging topics of mutual interest; occasions to share one's accumulated wisdom drawn from decades of experience living and working in a university setting; opportunities to celebrate (and support) scholarship and creativity in later life; and, not least, many chances to mentor others, from graduate and undergraduate students, to junior faculty, to older faculty about to transition into retirement.   Our message was that Emory's emeritus organization aims to be, in every sense of the word, a College.

The heart of our presentation was Gretchen's description of our twice-monthly luncheon colloquia, so she continues here in her own voice:

In my section of the conference presentation I spoke first of my own early history with the Emeritus College, explaining that I learned of its existence only a few months before my retirement (three years ago), when I opened an email inviting me to speak at one of its twice-monthly speaker sessions. I was delighted to oblige. I had just completed an edition of Othello and was chock full of stuff to say, including stuff that would be suitable for the talk appropriate to Women's History Month that the EUEC hoped I'd be able to give. I spoke on Desdemona--on the way she's portrayed in the text of the play and has been enacted in productions through the ages. And what a treat it was to deliver that talk to a "class" of "students" who were not eighteen or nineteen years old, who were grown-ups, grown-way-way-ups, people with lifetimes of experience and expertise shaping their responses to what I had to say.

In the next several months, I returned to hear others speak. And I began to realize what Emory's Emeritus College was all about, what it had to offer me and other soon-to-be-retirees fearful of losing the pleasures of life lived in intellectual community such as college and university faculty enjoy. I came to understand its programming might help to fill the void that loomed beyond the date of my separation from Emory (as I thought of my retirement then). When I was asked if I'd like to sit on the Teaching and Lecturing Committee that arranged much of that EUEC programming, I said I'd be happy to. And I stayed happy, even when the first meeting somehow ended with me responsible for recruiting speakers for the sessions that have since come to be known as the Luncheon Colloquia.

As I explained to the AROHE audience, I stayed happy because the work involved (and it was a lot of work) was also fun--and all the more fun (and more manageable) when I had the good sense to seek a partner-in-scheduling and the good luck to find him in another new retiree, Sidney Perkowitz. We set about collecting recommendations for speakers from all units of the University (and occasionally from elsewhere), researching those suggested, and composing possible speaker schedules that would allow for the maximum mix of current and former faculty and administrators, of disciplines and (within disciplines) areas of expertise, of age, gender, race, ethnicity, and so forth. Then we'd issue invitations, making the delightful discovery that they were usually accepted, and proceed to firm up arrangements, turning info over to EUEC marketing specialist Isha Edwards, who'd handle publicity (and catering and tech support and you name it). By the time Al Padwa took over as my scheduling partner just a few months ago, I was able to assure him that the program was running smoothly, with a steadily growing number of frequent attendees who report that they do enjoy the sense of intellectual engagement the colloquia provide, not least because the speakers and their topics represent so wide a range of disciplines, often beyond the attendees' own.

Now I've got to confess, I would not have spent so much time thus describing the basics of the colloquia arrangements had so many of those at the conference not insisted I do so. I, who arrived at the conference assuming that the dozens of retirement organizations represented there would all have speaker programs much like ours, soon discovered that almost none of them do. When people asked what I was doing for Emory's Emeritus College and learned I was scheduling speakers, and doing so twice a month, they seemed flabbergasted. And that left me flabbergasted. Only Karl Scheibe, Director of the Center for Retired Faculty at Wesleyan (and, incidentally, one of the external reviewers who evaluated our Emeritus College this past spring), said, "Oh, sure. We schedule two speakers a month, too." Everyone else said, "How do you do that?" As if it were a rather remarkable feat! So that's why I told them "how we do that," in some detail, though I rather felt like saying, "Hey, it's not rocket surgery. . . ."

I'd discovered John had been right when he touted Emory's Emeritus College as something special, something different, among retirement organizations, even among the very few that also call themselves Emeritus Colleges. We do offer programming that is intellectually engaging, that does promote "the life of the mind," that lets us stay in "school forever." And John was able to reinforce this point for our AROHE audience when he followed what I had to say about the Luncheon Colloquia with a description of the Interdisciplinary Seminars we're beginning to schedule now, a description that left people just as interested (and yes, even envious) as my description of the colloquia had. Again, though, our message was, "You can do this, too." And how? Well, channeling Nike, "Just do it." Aren't we lucky that our Emeritus College embodies that can-do attitude as effectively as it does? And one further note. If you yourself would like to do more of what we're doing than you're currently doing--that is, if you're up for some work (and some fun) of the sort that promotes intellectual engagement--consider volunteering to assist with the latest of our opportunities to live (and help others live) "the life of the mind"--namely, our new newsletter. I know Gray Crouse is looking for a few good men and women to support him in this venture that he has simply begun to just do--as is our wont.

Gretchen Schulz

John Bugge

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