I'm not so old that I can't think back to walking like a zombie into my 8 a.m. Old Testament Literature class in college.
But it is walkers and the non-dead trying to keep from being eaten who will be the subjects of a new UC Irvine course based on the hit series The Walking Dead. The university, the AMC cable network and Instructure, a provider of online academics, actually collaborated to create the UCI Extension course.
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The massive open online course, or MOOC, is scheduled to commence Oct. 14, a day after the season four premiere of The Walking Dead on AMC. It's to run eight Mondays through Dec. 2, with provisions to prevent show spoilers for international students as the class is open worldwide but first-run episodes are not.
Yes, UCI is a public institution, but before you go whining to Sen. Tom “Pork Buster” Coburn, you should know the class was developed with no taxpayer funds.
Professors Zuzanna Bic, Joanne Christopherson, Michael Dennin and Sarah Eichhorn, whose specialties span a variety of disciplines, will teach because any loyal Walking Dead viewer knows the show treads on social science, public health, mathematics and physics. Literature, too, if the eggheads dare delve into the source material.
And yes, the looming zombie apocalypse is indeed the backdrop to it all. Brainiacs, meet brain eaters. But wouldn't it be something if UCI developed an online class around The Talking Dead?
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.