May 19, 2017

Dobbelmann acknowledges that "such brief — and often intense — courses about events taking place in real time are not the usual fare for either faculty members or students. These pop-ups are neither simply shortened courses nor intensives. They cannot be approached primarily in terms of content coverage and discipline-specific skills mastery."

"How does one teach, and how does one assess, in this context?" writes Dobbelmann. "The course’s very immediacy, its proximity to our lives, offers the answer: it demands teaching and learning that embraces central, cross-disciplinary capacities such as research, analysis, collaboration, and creativity; the development of these capacities is much more heavily emphasized than fixed outcomes. In this way, pop-up courses can both enact and model a deep, thoughtful, and active engagement with the world."