MOOC Features Lessons From 'The Walking Dead'MOOC Features Lessons From 'The Walking Dead'

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If there should be flesh-eating zombies in your future, you'll be glad to have studied the lessons of "The Walking Dead" in the new MOOC offered by instructors at the University of California Irvine.

The characters in AMC's zombie apocalypse drama, based on the comic book series of the same name, have had to figure things out on their own. The show premiered in 2010 and tells the story of former sheriff's deputy Rick Grimes who, following a shootout, awakens from a coma in a hospital that has been turned upside down by the reanimation of the dead. As has been common in zombie dramas since at least the time of George Romero's 1968 movie "Night of the Living Dead," the walking corpses shamble around looking for opportunities to feast on human flesh. A zombie bite infects the living, condemning them to the same fate. Only a bullet (or a spear or a crowbar) through the head prevents the dead from walking the earth.

UC Irvine's free online course, "Society, Science, Survival: Lessons from AMC's 'The Walking Dead,'" is being produced with support from AMC and will be hosted on the Canvas Network. It will be taught by a multidisciplinary team: Zuzana Bic (Program in Public Health), Joanne Christopherson (School of Social Sciences), Michael Dennin (School of Physical Sciences) and Sarah Eichhorn (Department of Mathematics). The first class is scheduled for Monday, Oct. 14, the day after the premiere of Season 4, and the course will run for eight consecutive Mondays through Dec. 2.

Lessons have been prepared based on the last three seasons. Instructors have not been given an advance look at the new episodes; they will watch and comment on them along with the class. AMC is providing access to past episodes to enrolled students for the duration of the course so they can study their zombie lore.

"In my week of the course, we'll be looking at the mathematical modeling of an epidemic and how it spreads," Eichhorn said in an interview. The mathematical model she will use includes differential equations, a topic typically covered post-calculus. Eichhorn can't assume students will fully understand it, nor will she have time to teach it in depth. However, at a minimum the course offers an opportunity to reach a large audience from the general public and show them how mathematics can be useful in the real world, she said.

"We're looking forward to all the faculty coming together the night the new season launches, which will be the night before the course goes live," said Melissa Loble, associate dean of distance learning at UC Irvine.

Over the past three seasons, the story has advanced from that of a lone survivor to a community banding together for mutual defense, with individuals trying to preserve their humanity despite the brutality of their circumstances. By the end of season 3, the survivors were trying to create a defensible position in a former prison while competing for resources with a neighboring community headed a charismatic but crazy leader known as the Governor. When Grimes confronts his young son about shooting an unarmed man, the boy in turn rebukes his father for being too slow to act and too quick to show mercy in ways that tend to backfire. By the end of the episode, Grimes and his comrades have achieved at least a temporary victory over the Governor and convinced many members of the other community to join them -- setting the stage for more conflict to come in season 4.

"Fans of the show know that 'The Walking Dead' is about more than zombies; it's about survival, leadership and adapting to situations that are perilous and uncertain," said Theresa Beyer, vice president of promotions and activation at AMC, in a statement for the press release.

Once you accept the fantastic premise, the details of the show stand up to scientific scrutiny fairly well, according to Eichhorn. "I know our social scientist has been fairly impressed by how they're applying the themes of social science." When the physics instructor questioned the realism of how the characters' weapons worked in one particular episode, Eichhorn added, subsequent research turned up evidence that the show was more realistic on that point than he had supposed.

Not all the professors watched the show before they became involved in the project, but in preparation for the course, Eichhorn said, "We've all been binge-watching it and have become big fans."

UC Irvine has tried a variety of experiments with MOOCs over the past nine months and sees this course as an opportunity to do it on a large scale, with a course built around pop culture, Loble explained. Courses riffing on pop culture themes have been popular on campus in the past, but the online course made it practical to bring a bigger team of instructors together. "It's more interdisciplinary than an on-campus class would be," she pointed out.

The Canvas Network, which is the MOOC hosting spin-off of Instructure's Canvas learning management system, has approached free online courses with the same spirit of experimentation, according to Brian Whitmer, a co-founder of the company. "The jury is still out on what the end result is going to be [of the MOOC phenomenon]," he said. "We thought with the existing players in the MOOC space there wasn't enough experimentation."

Pop culture has been a winner for Canvas Network -- a Ball State University course titled "Gender through Comic Books" was one of its most popular to date.

In the zombie course, Whitmer said, he will be interested to see the impact on student engagement from having the course built around a scenario which -- while not exactly real world -- is content that people can relate to and that they can understand. Having the course schedule overlap with the release of a new season of episodes should make it more exciting for both the instructors and the students. This dovetails with research showing that teacher emotion and excitement about a subject improves learning outcomes, Whitmer pointed out.

UC Irvine has produced a series of MOOCs distributed through Coursera, one of which achieved notoriety when the instructor quit in the midst of the course. However, UC Irvine is starting another series of Coursera courses in addition to its venture with Canvas Network. You can see a video replay of a panel discussion UC Irvine hosted in May on how to make MOOC, which also included participants from Google, Stanford University and the University of Michigan.

Follow David F. Carr at @davidfcarr or Google+, along with @IWKEducation.