n.paradoxa’s MOOC (Mass Open Online Course): a case study in feminist online pedagogies

This chapter examines the environment in which an experiment outside the academy was created which is a feminist intervention in online learning. This MOOC http://nparadoxa.com was written by myself and privately published by my company, KT press. It is on the subject of feminism and contemporary art in art theory, history and criticism and was designed in relation to resources on the internet and the work of n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal (1998-2017). Discussion of feminism in fine art courses has been curtailed significantly in the last decade, largely due to the overall reduction of options for students in course provision and the over-emphasis on models of student-centred learning, as if it were a substitute. In art history, separate courses on women artists, where engagement with feminist art history had taken place for more than 4 decades, are now rare in the UK. More often a single course on gender and representation is offered in fine art/visual culture focused on the body and sexuality, which embraces some feminist theory/ women’s studies/ gender studies approaches as well as queer theory and masculinity studies. Feminist art history generally only appears in a single token lecture as a theoretical overview of the field, often contrasting the 1970s with the present and offering a highly selective insight into problems and issues in art. This MOOC aimed to develop learning in relation to this deficit and at the same time to teach its participants how to navigate the web’s resources on this subject (without Wikipedia or Ted Talks!). Femtechnet describe nparadoxa’s MOOC’s approach more accurately as a DOCC, Distributed Open Collaborative Course, a feminist retooling of the MOOC. This chapter will explore the pros and cons of online learning as an intervention in feminist pedagogy in a humanities field.

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Series ISSN: 2524-6445