A new UF course on music history is uniting nations — at least online.
More than 31,000 people around the globe have enrolled in Music’s Big Bang: The Genesis of Rock ‘n’ Roll, a new massive open online course on Coursera. But the class developer and instructor is in Gainesville — it’s UF Center for Media Innovation and Research executive director David Carlson.
“My guess is that within a week, I’ll have more students than the entire Student Body of Florida State,” Carlson said.
He said about 70 percent of the students live outside of the U.S., in countries like Moldova, China, South Africa, Jamaica, Mexico and Spain.
The first person to post in the class was on a boat in New Zealand.
The class, which started March 13 and runs through mid-May, covers 60 years of music, starting in the early 1900s.
“It’s more about what led up to rock ‘n’ roll,” Carlson said, “than it is about rock ‘n’ roll itself.”
He also said the university is adjusting the class to offer it as a four-credit course to UF students this Summer.
The fully online class is free and allows students to sign up until the end of the course.
Instead of having two 60-minute lectures, they’re broken down into 12 separate 10-minute downloadable videos to make them manageable. Carlson said a lot of the students have jobs and a family, which makes watching a 10-minute video more convenient.
Hiring teaching assistants to grade the course work was unrealistic, Carlson said, so exams will be computer graded. Students will grade each others’ optional projects.
Jason Cain, a UF mass communications Ph.D. candidate who taught Rock ‘n’ Roll and American Society with Carlson, said he is excited to see UF getting into the MOOC market.
“The benefit is that you can get a lot of information to people quickly and efficiently,” Cain said. “It also alleviates the tyranny of geography a bit and allows a person from really anywhere to participate in classes offered by UF.”
Victoria Cappelli, a 20-year-old UF public relations junior, said she’d be hesitant to sign up for the Coursera class.
“I would be somewhat interested, but probably not enough to actually enroll in the class,” said Cappelli, who’s taking Rock ‘n’ Roll and American Society. “A lot of the things that I have even learned in this class are really easy to read about online.”
[A version of this story ran on page 3 on 3/20/2014 under the headline "Music course hits high note internationally"]
