Penn’s Al Filreis: Coursera’s Outstanding Educator Award |
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Al Filreis, the Kelly Family Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is the recipient of an inaugural Coursera Outstanding Educator Award. Dr. Filreis, who is also the director of Penn’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and faculty director at Kelly Writers House, received the Transformation Award, given to an instructor who has contributed the most to the platform’s vision of enabling anyone, anywhere to transform their life through its massive open online courses, or MOOCs.
Dr. Filreis’ Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (ModPo) was among the first humanities courses on the Coursera platform. The introduction to poetry class emphasizes experimental verse, from Dickinson and Whitman to the present.
“Al Filreis is one of the pioneers of online learning,” said Provost Vincent Price. “His ModPo course has changed our understanding of what is possible online while shaping the knowledge of poetry around the world. Above all, he embodies our mission of embracing online the most powerful values of teaching and learning at Penn.”
Stanton Wortham, a Penn Graduate School of Education professor and faculty director of the Penn Online Learning Initiative, accepted the award for Dr. Filreis on March 22 in the Netherlands at the annual Coursera Partners Conference. In a video played at the conference, Dr. Filreis said MOOCs will transform the old style of lectures in the classroom.
“Global collaboration yields better knowledge and understanding than the old lecture. MOOCs, rather than reinforcing the mode of the lecture, will see the end of the lecture as we know it,” Dr. Filreis said.
Penn was a founding university partner in Coursera in 2012 and has continued to be at the forefront of online learning, offering 87 courses, representing all 12 Penn Schools, with almost five million enrollments. The next live, interactive 10-week session of ModPo will begin on September 10 and will conclude on November 21.
See https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo
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