New MOOC Expands Civil Rights Instruction - Higher Education: Civil rights historian and award-winning author Taylor Branch is on a mission to make the Civil Rights Movement more prominent in higher education—and he’s teaching a new MOOC on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to do it.
“I’m hoping the Internet technology will open (courses) up at a cheaper cost for students from all over the place to have access to this history,” said Branch, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the newly-released “The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement.”
The 190-page book—a “guided distillation” of Branch’s longer trilogy on the King years—is the basis of a new course Branch is teaching this semester at the University of Baltimore through a small-group honors seminar that is also being offered on a trial basis as a MOOC, or Massive Open Online Course.
