Zombies
have lurched their way into all facets of pop culture and now it’s apparently
time for them to take a bite out of higher education. The University of
California, Irvine, is collaborating with the AMC television network and the
Instructure technology company to offer a massive open online course (MOOC)
based on AMC’s rabidly popular show The
Walking Dead.
The
eight-week multidisciplinary class—which just happens to start the day after
the show’s fourth-season debut on Oct. 13—will be taught by four UC Irvine
faculty members specializing in public health, social sciences, physics, and
mathematics.
At
first glance, the course may seem like the MOOC equivalent of underwater
basket-weaving, but the brains behind it are dead serious about the goals of
the course. In the average MOOC, registrants drop faster than zombie plague
victims. By weaving a TV show into the class content, UC Irvine thinks
participants are more likely to survive to the end of the course.
“As
an educator, I’m always looking for ways to make scholarly ideas come alive for
my students,” said Zuzana Bic, one of the instructors.
Working
through Instructure’s Canvas online learning platform, Society, Science,
Survival: Lessons from AMC’s The Walking Dead will mix video lectures, expert
interviews, academic resources and articles, and group discussions with clips
from the TV show and exclusive interviews with cast members. There will be
occasional quizzes but no final exam.
The
course will explore public health issues and the spread of infectious diseases;
analyze social roles and human behavior, particularly within the context of a
disaster; examine the mathematics of population dynamics and energy
consumption; and, according to the course description, resolve the nagging
question, “Nutrition in a post-apocalyptic world—are squirrels really good for
you?”
