 Welcome back to another episode of Domain's 21, where I have, this is a personal interest story for me. I have been dying to hear more about the open online course, Anth101, and I have two of the three creators here, Mike Wesh, Tom Woodward, and the other one who can't be with us, Brian Klatsky. Is that right that I pronounce the last name? Klatsky. Klatsky. Yep. So, I'm actually going to ask you both. What is Anth101 and how did it get started? Well, a good way to start would actually be with Brian Klatsky, who's not here. Back in 2014, he started teaching online for us, and our entire faculty was super skeptical about the idea that you could teach anthropology online. And then we started seeing his teaching evaluations, which were not just good, you know, not just like, it wasn't just the numbers that were coming through. It was these like long essays from students saying how much it changed their life. And so we started peeking in like, Brian, what are you doing? And he had set up, you know, ways to get people out in the world. And I think that was the key. He had two driving principles. He saw, for one, he had this really diverse group of students who were coming from all walks of life. There was, you know, taxi drivers and ex-military. And this is really rich collection of people. And he thought, okay, how do I make anthropology relevant to all these people? And then the second piece of that was he wanted to put it out in the world. So it wasn't that it was online. It was that, you know, if you're driving a taxi in Cincinnati, maybe you could show us what that looks like and do a little ethnography, you know, and share that with us through video. So that was the original insight. And then a few years later, I had to teach online. Ryan and I got together for the summer. We invited Tom in and we just started kind of building the best of both of our classes together with this idea of adding to those two first principles, anthropology for everyone and then getting it out in the world. We added this third principle, which is basically that you can't just think your way into a new way of living. You have to live your way into a new way of thinking. And that meant we wanted to build a set of challenges that got people out into the world, actually practicing basic anthropology. So that's where it started. And Tom came and joined us for just a few days in the summer, but we were in touch that whole summer and then for a couple of years after that, just reiterating and reiterating. How did the design of the site reinforce the kind of philosophy underpinning it, right? You have to be out doing this to make it make sense. Yeah, we kind of championed like student content from the beginning. So we tried to build websites that could show that student content. So they go out into the world, do something, and then that student content would be showcased. So me, Tom, could talk more about that. Yeah, and I think one of the attempts certainly was to get the technology out of the way as much as possible, both in terms of just dealing with the scale, the number of students going through, and just making life as simple and positive as possible for them. So a lot of times, different things get in the way when you're trying to submit content or show things, but the evidence of them doing things contextualized by the frameworks and the challenges was what this website tried to do. So, and to try to do it as simply as possible for those students using a variety of different things as the site evolved. So we started out trying to make everything happen in the site and make it simply happen. And then we moved to Instagram and tried to bring the things in. And now, based on a conversation just a minute ago, it sounds like maybe we're coming full circle and starting to change where that might happen and where it might show up. I was fascinated by the way in which you both not only built it on WordPress, and it was a bit of a heavier site, and you were doing a lot with it. And then you really streamlined that by offloading almost all of the heavy lifting of sharing challenges. And we could talk a little bit about the structure of the site to Instagram. And as you just mentioned, Tom, there's been a further evolution. And so thinking specifically about how the infrastructure was both fully open source and home built, then outsourced to Instagram and now maybe a rethinking of that with other infrastructures and why. Yeah, maybe we should share some of the breaking points for us. So we built the site completely inside WordPress. And there were a lot of advantage to that in terms of like control and how things appeared on the site. We were able to make things look exactly like we wanted them to look. We started having trouble with some sort of hack and maybe Tom could explain that. So we started getting heavy traffic because of like, was it a bunch of registrations that weren't real or what was going on there? Yeah, I think that was one of the problems at one point was we needed to get some spam registrants out because you got popular, but the site got out there. And then you get kind of besieged by things. So that was one of the issues. The other issue was having due dates, we had several faculty using the site. And it seems that almost all faculty were assigning things due on Sunday night. So we'd have this rush on Sunday night. And it was just hard to keep up with on the server side and it was going to be very expensive. And so we started thinking about how we could offload and so we then moved to Instagram and we found some ways to bring those Instagram posts into the WordPress site basically instantly. We used plugins as well as some Tom magic. And all that was working really well, but then it kept breaking because Instagram, I don't think really likes to have their stuff shown on other sites. And so Instagram basically kept breaking it on us. And so that became a bit of a headache as well. Yeah, there's trouble with relying on kind of the external APIs, particularly Instagram with Facebook's acquisition as they kept pulling things back and breaking and breaking quite intentionally. Well, how did that like so maybe it would be interesting to think about the move to designing it, building it homegrown, going out to Instagram, right? Running into the problems with Instagram, not only around the technology, but often probably around students are using Instagram for a whole variety of things, often not educational or often fraught with social or personal meaning. And did that start to create issues? Were there issues there that made you rethink, okay, maybe Instagram isn't the best platform, what else? Well, so some students struggled with how do you do this? And in particular, they were really worried about their brand, you might say, on Instagram. So they started creating Finsta's, which worked really well. A couple of issues we ran into, one was there's always this set of students who just aren't really technologically inclined. And maybe they've never been on social media. I know that sounds surprising, but it does happen. And some of them are not on social media for very deep reasons. They've really thought about it and they just never want to get on social media. So there was always some element of needing to make space for those people. And so we always had alternatives for them. But in general, it was a lot of fun, people were posting on Instagram. They're able to like each other's posts very easily. It was just generally like it worked really, really well. And the other thing that was nice about it was we could see like lots of different faculty using it and students could peek in on other classes around the country and eventually around the world who are using it. I'm not sure what the hashtag has on it now. It says, I just checked it here. It's over 16,000 posts. And so that's kind of fun, people are using the hashtag and sharing stuff. But I think the challenge is always like what's private? What's public? Where does it happen? Who has ownership on it? These are things that come up whenever I talk to people. And we've replicated aspects of this pattern. So that's one of the cool things about this one is you went and you made it something that other faculty members could use with other courses at other institutions. So that's one of those big things to do and comes with some complexity. It comes with some awesome benefits because part of this, when you say in the world, it's pretty awesome that you can see it happening in the world in all these different places. But, and I think you're going to hit on this now, is there also kind of some repercussions maybe of those choices of public? Yeah, and so I think maybe this is the right way to say it is that it's not that we're totally shifting away from Instagram. It's that the emphasis in my course, for example, was basically like let's do this on Instagram, like encouraging everybody to do it on Instagram, but there's this backup where you don't have to do it. And you can just do it on Canvas, like behind closed doors kind of thing. I think we shifted now to a different sort of waiting of those elements. And now I actually encourage students to do it on Canvas. And then if they want to share it on Instagram, that's just up to them. And they can do that if they want to, and a few students do that. The nice thing about that shift is that now all the posts are coming into this sort of private space, this walled garden of Canvas. And there's a bunch of ways that we can monitor and encourage people to participate there. And for a lot of students, they like to have everything in one place, like all their classes in one place. And having to go outside of Canvas feels a little bit burdensome. So we're getting a lot more participation by keeping it all inside Canvas. It allows students to kind of have their notifications on Canvas set up in a way that it's kind of that school space. And they're not like feeling this weird poll where Instagram feels like this non-school space, but then setting up notifications for this account can get kind of confusing. I think just in general, people are navigating these complex social relationships. And in general, we found that the Canvas thing is working a lot better. And then some students go out and use Instagram. The upside of that is that the stuff that ends up on Instagram is generally higher quality. It's a little bit less watered down because it's mostly just the really good stuff where students are really wanting to share something. Are you feeling the tension with the original idea that you and Ryan had to get this out in the world? And then now you're back behind the walled garden of Canvas. And are you trading Canvas for Instagram? Or it's just interesting because it's almost like the not only evolution of the technology, but evolution of the thinking around how to teach openly. Right. I think the original idea was also that we wanted to create challenges that were so awesome that lots of people would want to do them, even if they weren't signed up for the class. So we imagined people doing the 28-day challenge, which is just you try to break a habit or create a habit over the course of 28 days. Like maybe that's the kind of thing that could go viral on Instagram. And people would see this 28-day challenge, hashtag AMP 101. And then maybe other people would do it just for fun. And pretty soon we got the idea was we would have people taking the class who aren't really in the class. And they're just sort of taking it online, participating when they want to, diving out when they don't want to. And we got some of that. But the kind of the weird thing is if you look at some of the posts that have hashtag AMP 101, some of them are low quality. Some of them are even potentially offensive. And that's where you start to be like, man, I don't know. This is tricky. I feel partially responsible for this post that is borderline offensive. And it's one thing to handle that in the classroom. And there are certain ways to handle that in the classroom. It's trickier when it's out in the world. Well, and I think what becomes interesting to me is it felt like when would we start this? I don't know. That was a long time ago. It feels like it's almost five years now, I think. And a lot has happened in five years. And I think it felt, I don't know, more innocent at that point. And a lot of these things just didn't seem as conflicted. And I think what I've done more and more of is kind of those blended spaces and being able to push back and forth between fully private, maybe semi-private, or at least controlled groups, and then fully public. And that's what I think is an interesting space for some of this, is that if we take Canvas, for instance, you can decide we've done embedded WordPress sites within Canvas, so you get the control and visuals of something like that, we've knitted Instagram things into Canvas as well, and then done some stuff around pushing content in and out of that space. So trying to make it, once again, that facile ability to kind of move maybe from private in Canvas to public in Instagram or wherever, and creating those mechanisms. So maybe you end up with the best of both worlds without a lot of technical over it. And I think maybe that's an aspect of the future, is gradations of public and private, and then trying to take advantage of the services rather than them taking advantage of us so much. It's interesting too, because one of the things that, and I don't know if it has to do with the network effects of doing what you've done on Instagram or in WordPress, et cetera, was it's become like a media empire, right? Like you have textbooks free, both paperback, as well as a digital edition. You have a film school. You have a whole series of other faculty at other schools doing Anth 101, and then you have a resource guide for them. Like talk a little bit about what it's been like to build this out as a shared course, as an open course for other people to use and adapt, I imagine, as they see fit. Yeah, I think that speaks to kind of realizing like what is best out in public and what is best kept in private. And one of the elements there is stuff that's just really well polished. I'm OK putting out. And this has to do with my own personal media philosophy, which is in general, I try not to consume any media that took less than two days to produce. That's just sort of my own media diet, is I like things that are thoughtful and considered. So those are books, thoughtful YouTube videos, not just real quick throw it up their videos. And generally, I stay away from social media. So that's kind of how I run the site as well, is now I've got the book out there totally public, totally free in multiple formats. I participate in multiple faculty groups, some of them on Facebook, just basic Facebook groups. And then we also have our own sort of private Google group, where we share ideas specific to Anth101. And so in general, this has been a really fun way to do things for me. I produce videos for the course. And again, those are like take a long time to produce, and then they get pushed out. Sometimes those include student work, but that gives me time to sort of contextualize and polish that work before it gets showcased. So it's not just like throwing stuff out into the world. And I don't know, it sort of can feel like it kind of gunks up the internet to throw out low quality work. So that's part of the philosophy behind that. So it's like the opposite of DS106 and that. Well, it's a tricky thing, because I love DS106. And the nice thing about the internet, of course, is that it does have these filtering mechanisms. But I have been embarrassed on occasion at being someone who's been an advocate of being out in the open for now, for like 15 years. I have been embarrassed on occasion by things that really probably shouldn't have been out in the open. Sometimes they're just like quick lecture notes or something that aren't totally polished, but they include like non-contextualized information that I'm just not super proud of like have my name associated with. And so I've become a lot more careful about making sure that what gets out there that I can vet like gets fetted well and it's high quality stuff that goes out. That's one of the things I have struggled with though, like real quick is like, how do you like demonstrate like this evolution of thought if all that people see is the published piece? You know what I mean? And that's the tricky thing I find with a lot of this is I understand like a lot of the concerns, but I'm also trying to show people like, look, I thought this then more time and I felt this and like it's okay and good that these things should evolve and continue to improve. Like just to demonstrate that better is something that I kind of struggle with. One of the key things that changed with Instagram just in the last five years for us is that more and more people see it as a curated space, not as a social space. And so that's one of the sort of triggers for students is like, oh shoot, I'm really not comfortable messing with my curated space here, you know? So the Finsta thing helps, of course, but I think Instagram in some ways like shifted. And there's a whole other layer here where I heard more and more students who had had really bad experiences on Instagram that just made it difficult for them to participate on the website at all. I think that plays into some stuff that's happening with this generation in general, which is obviously they've struggled through a lot of challenges that we didn't have. And the internet is one of those challenges, just trying to figure out how to navigate it and be in it. Well, and I think maybe that's the thing, like everything is getting more complex, more and more things to think about, which is kind of the opposite of what was promised, right? Like, you know? But I think it is the deal, right? Like what's private, what's public, what's curated, what's this, what's that? Like all of it blends and merges in ways that we're just not seeing. You can't just say like be in the open. Like this is all good and positive. Or, and I think at the same time, you can't say like be totally private because you wanna be building this reputation, you wanna be creating, you know, this identity in certain ways and different people are just gonna navigate it. And I guess the technologies and the social implications have only grown more complex. And the courses like this or more broadly higher ed should be a place where that's thought of and navigated through these experiences. And so that really does tie deeply. Well, I mean, I really enjoyed this conversation. I enjoy the work you both have done for many a year, but seeing you two work together and that's one of one as a highlight. And thank you both for taking the time to chat with us about your work. Thank you. Big fan. Nom, nom, nom.