08 Mar 2017

n.paradoxa's MOOC (mass open online course)

n.paradoxa's MOOC (mass open online course) on contemporary art (post-1970) and feminism has just opened at:-

nparadoxa.com

This online course was written by Katy Deepwell, editor of n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal.

n.paradoxa's MOOC is free and users just have to register their email to join it. Users can join anytime and continue at their own pace.
There are 10 lessons ranging from 'Feminism as a Cloud' to 'Feminism as an Avant-garde'. In addition to the lessons, there are open forums for people to respond to the lessons and post their own ideas for discussion.

This connectivist model of learning is closer to femtechnet's description of a DOCC (rather than a MOOC) because the lessons link to many resources online and are designed to be read anytime at the user's own pace. (A DOCC= Distributed Open Collaborative Course is a feminist retooling of the popular genre of networked learning called MOOCs).

This course is open to anyone but it is expected that the largest interest in the course will be from young artists, curators and scholars (especially 18-25 year olds) i.e. graduates and postgraduates needing an introduction to feminism and contemporary art and who wish to learn how to negotiate the internet as a resource for research and scholarship (without reference to Wikipedia or Ted talks!).

The MOOC uses many resources from the internet, among them those gathered for n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal's website at www.ktpress.co.uk.

The journal, n.paradoxa, continues on a separate site to this new MOOC. Vol. 39 (Jan 2017) of n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal on Organising/Organisations (previously announced on e-artnow) marks 20 years of publication of this journal.

n.paradoxa's MOOC is published by KT press as an independent production using Wordpress and was supported by a grant from Innovate UK.

The motivation for setting up this online course on contemporary art and feminism is the scarcity of information provided on this subject in general course curriculums for fine art / art history / visual culture and the growing demand of young people for discussion of these issues, especially the relationship between art and politics.
This is the first MOOC dedicated to this subject and written by the editor of the only international feminist art journal in the field.