Dive Summary:
- Harvard solicited donations of time Monday for a new humanities MOOC, "The Ancient Greek Hero," asking that alumni who previously took the course volunteer as online mentors and discussion group mentors.
- The MOOC is based on the school's popular "Concepts of the Ancient Greek Hero" course, created by Professor Gregory Nagy and taken by an estimated 10,000 students since the late 1970s--a number dwarfed by the 27,000 enrolled in the MOOC counterpart.
- Discussions in the course--which covers works like Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” dialogues by Plato and poetry by Sappho--will be directed by around 10 of Dr. Nagy's former teaching fellows, assisted by the still-undetermined number of former students.
From the article:
... For the first time, Harvard has opened a humanities course, The Ancient Greek Hero, as a free online class. In an e-mail sent Monday, it asked alumni who had taken the course at the university to volunteer as online mentors and discussion group managers. ...