Introduction

This MOOC will explore humanity’s changing engagement with marine environments, and the marine environment’s impact on humanity, over the last 2.5 million years. It will showcase Southampton’s world leading expertise in maritime studies and ocean and earth science, whilst also serving to fuse science and humanities based approaches to learning.  The module begins by exploring the marine environment to help participants better understand its changing form and character through time, and the science behind that understanding. This will introduce students to key themes, which they can then examine through openly accessible datasets via online tasks and open source software. This will not only help them contextualise past and present marine activity, but also to understand broader issues such as the impacts of long-term climate change on society. Once this baseline knowledge is established, content will go on to consider how societies have engaged with the sea over millennia; from the importance of marine resources, processes of colonisation and exploration, through to the development of maritime technologies.

Significantly, discussion in both threads (physical and social) will move from the past to the present, and then be projected into the future: how might marine technologies develop and how do we globally respond to sea-level change and marine resource degradation? The overarching topic and temporal structure ensures coherence in module content, whilst allowing a broad range of specialisms to contribute.  This will help to further raise Southampton’s profile in maritime studies and to attract UG, PGT and PGR students to a range of faculties. The course content, and tags that will be associated with it online, speak to a range of interests that have demonstrably high visibility/interest online (climate change, technology, history, archaeology, engineering, ethics).  However, at present no MOOC/iTunes U course offers this unique maritime perspective.  As such, we would hope to not only attract archaeologists, historians and ocean scientists, but a broader population interested in associated contributing data and viewpoints.

As a group we have a considerable amount of material in appropriate formats; from datasets that can be used for tasks, through to video and computer imagery/animations for enrichment of online content. We are aware that there is a time/cost element in brining this together to a high standard, but can draw on experience and content created for established modules to reduce this impact. With regard to the team, we are motivated by scholarly interest (and a desire to pass that on to a wider audience) and a recognised need to showcase the universities research led, innovative approach to teaching.

Information below is plagiarised from several places – it is to give an indication of what you need to include!

Workload: 2-6 hours/week

Sessions: September 2014 (6 weeks long)

About the course

This MOOC focuses on… It will provide learners with an introduction to… It will encourage learning through doing archaeology online via access to research data from the site and experts in the field. The MOOC builds on…

Upon completion of the course, students should be able to:

• reflect on Southampton and surrounding area in relation to its historical context from current research
• provide an analysis of the range of archaeological methods that are in place in Southampton, including techniques, data, values, & ethics
• differentiate between the uses of a range of the archaeological digital techniques in use in Southampton
• evaluate multidisciplinary methods and theories in the context of archaeological fieldwork

Course syllabus

Week 1: Southampton location, site information, history, contextual information, timeline etc

Week 2: Archaeology practical techniques: site recording methods and how to interpret excavation reports and data

Week 3: Research designs, values and ethics

Week 4: Digital archaeology and Southampton – ‘Making Southampton come to life’

Week 5: Multidisciplinary methods in action at Southampton (How we learn from others?)

Week 6: Final assessment week or recap week?

Recommended background

Anyone and everyone is welcome to take this course. Students should be curious, enthusiastic readers, with undergraduate level analytical and critical thinking skills; and have an interest in archaeology, history and the sea. A basic understanding of X would also be useful.

Suggested Readings

While there will be a small number of readings for each week, all of these will be available online without charge. If you want something that will take you further, we recommend X. You may also want X.

Course format

(This is the kind of information that is required here…). The course will consist of x lectures, x per week. Each lecture will be made up of x video modules or parts. Each of the video modules will be about x minutes in length.

Most of the video modules (i.e. parts of the lectures) will have a mini quiz of one of two multiple choice questions. There will also be standalone readinsg and homework assignments that are not part of the video lectures. Additionally, there will be an overall lecture quiz or activity for each of the X lectures. The overall quiz will have approximately x multiple choice questions in it. There will not be a final exam.

In addition, we strongly urge students to take part in the online forum discussions for regular active engagement with the course material.

FAQ

• Will I receive a certificate at the end of this course?
• What resources will I need for this course?

Categories:

• Archaeology
• Humanities