By MARY PATRICK
Fans of “The Walking Dead” will soon be able to take a class where they can learn lessons that tie into themes and story lines from the popular television series.
The University of California-Irvine is providing the class in partnership with ed tech company Instructure and entertainment network AMC, which airs the show.
The eight-week course, called “Society, Science, Survival: Lessons from AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead,’” will be offered on Instructure’s MOOC platform, Canvas Network.
The course will draw upon themes from the first three seasons of the show, tying into mathematics, physics, public health and social science.
Course topics will include subjects such as how humans prioritize needs in a catastrophe, public health in a pandemic and the science of hope.
The eight-week course, which is not for credit, will start Oct. 14, shortly after the season 4 series premiere.
AMC will provide show clips for the class. The free course will be taught by UC -Irvine professors from physics, public health and social sciences. Each class will use something from the previous night’s episode as a starting point, enhancing the lesson by utilizing clips from older shows
“I just saw this as a venue to promote my discipline and share some interesting mathematics,” said class lecturer Sarah E. Eichhorn, according to Inside Higher Education.
Instructure co-founder Brian Whitmer said the company hit upon using “The Walking Dead” as the basis for a class while brainstorming about ways to work more pop culture into online courses.
“We have a lot of fans at the company,” Whitmer said, according to Inside Higher Education. “There was overwhelming feedback that this would be ‘freaking awesome.’ ”
“The Walking Dead,” about a group of people trying to survive in a world overrun by flesh-eating zombies, routinely draws more viewers than many network shows, according to Forbes.
About 5.2 million people watched the season 3 finale. And the post-show, “Talking Dead,” also often outdraws network shows for viewers., according to Forbes.
UC-Irvine is also a major partner with MOOC provider Coursera, but is “experimenting” with other MOOC platforms, UC-Irvine’s Melissa Loble told Inside Higher Education.
According to Forbes, the free course is another type of outreach by networks to fans. Networks, according to a Forbes article, want to secure fan loyalty and keep them coming back each week, and the course could help “The Walking Dead” stay “sticky.”
Meanwhile, the Forbes articles said, for UC-Irvine, the class offers the opportunity to see how many students are attracted by the mixture of pop culture and academics, not unlike the “Star Trek” course at Georgetown University and the courses on zombies at Columbia College in Chicago and Baltimore University.
Instructure expects the course to be one of the biggest classes in MOOC history.
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