Last academic year, students at different levels, in different programs, at different institutions, and in different countries, gathered in an online classroom for The Walking Undead: Zombies and Vampires in Literary and Cultural History. This course was an experiment in pedagogical collaboration: between undergraduate and graduate programs; between faculty with distinct fields of expertise (18th-century British literature and culture, and Romanticism and popular culture); and between different nations.

As we suggested readings, compared approaches, and negotiated the initiative with our respective administrations, we clarified our interests, premises, and methods. One of our first decisions, in creating a distinctive course on this subject matter, was to exclude two major, canonical novels: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818/1831) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). For one thing, we thought it safe to assume that many students would already have read Frankenstein; it’s one of the most widely taught English novels. (In addition, eschewing widely taught works can also help to protect a literary studies course -- and especially an open, fully online-based course -- against the threat of academic misconduct like plagiarism.) While we didn’t require these novels as course reading, we did name them as the two foremost titles in our recommended further reading list. The secondary readings served to frame our pedagogical approach and our particular take on the historical development of zombie and vampire literature, according to the contexts of the Gothic, colonialism, and capitalism.

To teach the resulting survey of zombie and vampire literature in the open-learning milieu, we established a course structure of five main modules, subdivided into week-by-week units of reading, discussion, and written assignment work. We divided the task of writing the modules -- commentaries on the readings with accompanying discussion prompts -- according to our different strengths and areas of expertise; but we reviewed and critiqued each other’s module drafts before we collated and uploaded them to the LMS space.

In September of 2018, we launched The Walking Undead, a seminar for senior undergraduates at SUNY Empire State and MA students at Athabasca. With some heroic assistance from the experts in curriculum and instructional design and educational technology, we built the course in such a way that made the technology as invisible as we conceivably could make it. Because although technology is central to the Gothic, for the course itself, we strove to ensure that problems with technology would be theoretical rather than practical.

In designing the learning experience, we also had to account for different learning levels and different whole systems: Dr Gliserman-Kopans’s cohort consisted of senior undergraduates in the USA; Dr McCutcheon’s, of MA students in Canada. In addition to the challenges presented by differing national contexts (despite a shared—broadly speaking—language, the ways in which national differences are felt were themselves a key piece of learning in the course) and physical distance, our students were also bridging the gap between undergraduate and graduate coursework. And, at times, the difference chafed: whereas the undergraduate students were clearly, at points, intimidated by the critical and rhetorical sophistication of the graduate students (a difference more keenly felt when the primary mode of expression is written rather than extemporaneous speech), the graduate students became frustrated by the prospect of wading through the sometimes anodyne, sometimes obtuse responses of the undergraduates. But as we had hoped, even these sources of friction worked to the benefit of both groups of students. The undergraduates, by dint of modelling and fear of embarrassment, were forced to do better work; their writing began to evince more critical thought and more careful reading. The graduate students were asked to think about their audience and to rely less on the specialized jargon they had worked so hard to acquire. They generously and patiently explained the claims they were making, and responded kindly to the questions and comments of their undergraduate colleagues. They formed—as we had fervently hoped they would—a genuine community of inquiry.

While we had sutured this community together out of the disparate elements in our virtual classrooms, some practical matters remained. Discussions were shared, but the assignments came with different sets of expectations applying to the different groups. We protected our students’ privacy by having students submit work to the institutions separately, and the grades were only accessible to the students’ own institutions. This sort of nimbleness and flexibility represented, we felt, one of the best capacities of both schools.

A pivotal factor in what made this course feasible is the fact that at both SUNY Empire State College and Athabasca University, students are able to pursue their courses and programs entirely by distance delivery, via a variety of media (mainly web-based LMS sites, but also e-mail, etc.). However, the affordances and resources of open-education institutions are shadowed by difficult logistical issues: how to share the fleshing-out of such a course’s bones; how to coordinate registration so students in not only different institutions but also different systems can enroll together; how to safeguard student privacy between different national (and regional) jurisdictions.

The course that we sutured together certainly had the potential to be a monstrosity. It certainly felt like it had a life of its own. The reading list was always threatening to spiral out of control, the technology could have broken in any number of ways, and the students could have revolted.
And the logistical concerns did feel, at some parts, as they did in Dracula: we were coordinating schedules, keeping track of texts flying back and forth, managing student questions about content and form, and solving problems we should have foreseen, but hadn’t. But again—as is the case in Dracula, good prevailed (albeit ambiguously). While professors of medicine and other sanguine men cannot save Lucy Westenra, for our students, additional professors in the course (at the risk of immodesty) did make things better: our students benefitted from expertise not available at their own institutions, and they were able to contribute to a critical conversation that continued to evolve in front of them, virtually, but in real time.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NRp6MFHXxEwtGVPtSupTQUcqdSp2MAhg