UPDATE (3/11/24): Registration for this public webinar to be held on the Zoom Webinar platform is now open: https://wakeforest-university.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ZlTmDJkwQt2XDsDqpJYUOQ#/registration

My current registration limit is 500 and the course is half full, so reserve your spot now!

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After years of people asking me if I would offer a public version of my Sociology of Guns class at Wake Forest University, I’m finally going to give it a try this spring.

I polled my social media followers on the best time of day for the webinar, but the responses were all over the place and people are in all different time zones. The bottom line was that everyone is on a different schedule. So, I had to just pick a day/time that works for me and hope for the best.

The webinar will meet for 7 consecutive Mondays from March 25th to May 6th from 6:00-7:00pm Eastern time. For those interested but who cannot attend live, a recording will be made available.

The syllabus is forthcoming, but for now some observations about the course follow.

Here are some preliminary thoughts. If you have questions or suggestions, please share them in the comments here.

(1) There will be no “tuition.” The model here is the MOOC – massive open online course – that had some popularity a while ago. I’m offering the course as a service to the community in response to a number of requests I have gotten over the years to have a public version of my Sociology of Guns course.

(2) Obviously, some of the best parts of the course I teach at Wake Forest cannot be replicated online. There will be no class field trip to the gun range, we will not be sitting down face-to-face in a seminar style and discussing the issues, and I will not be assigning or grading “homework.” The pedagogy will largely be lecture and Q&A.

(3) The course will run for seven weeks beginning in March and is structured around revisiting James Wright’s classic 1995 essay, “Ten Essential Observations on Guns in America,” as I did when I taught Sociology of Guns at Wake Forest in Fall 2016.

(4) I will teach the course one day per week for up to one hour as a Zoom webinar. This means only I can speak, but participants do have the option to chat with each other and ask questions of me live during the webinar.

(5) I will make readings available to those who register for the webinar, and registrants can ask questions about the readings in advance, which I will attempt to answer during the webinar.

(6) As befits a voluntary webinar course, I won’t expect people who sign up to attend live or attend weekly. There’s no “attendance policy.” I will make a recording of the webinar available to everyone who signs up, whether or not you ever attend live.

(7) I will look for opportunities to have guests join the webinar when appropriate. This has been a highlight of the course for Wake Forest students over the years, but my on-campus class met for 2.5 hours while this webinar will be 1 hour or less, so I’m not sure how exactly to fit guests in that time frame.

(8) I am thinking about ways to extend the conversation beyond the boundaries of the webinar itself, but in ways that do not require me to moderate the conversation as I’m only one person with a limited amount of time. If you have ideas on how to do this, please let me know.

What questions do you have? What am I forgetting?