Never let it be said that campus feminists leave any stone unturned when it comes to spreading their “War on Men” dogma.

Now, some of these progressive instructors have begun targeting the newly expanding Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) for use in their activism.

At first glance, “Feminism and Technology” sounds like another massive open online open course. The course will involve video components, and will be available online to anyone, with no charge. There are paths to credit, and it’s fine for students to take the course without seeking credit. An international student body is expected.

But don’t look for this course in any MOOC catalog. “Feminism and Technology” is trying to take a few MOOC elements, but then to change them in ways consistent with feminist pedagogy to create a distributed open collaborative course or DOCC (pronounced “dock”).

The DOCC aims to challenge MOOC thinking about the role of the instructor, about the role of money, about hierarchy, about the value of “massive,” and many other things. The first DOCC will be offered for credit at 16 colleges this coming semester, as well in a more MOOC-style approach in which videos and materials are available online for anyone.

“We’re not saying bad bad MOOCs, but we’re asking how else we might innovate,” said Anne Balsamo, co-facilitator of the DOCC and dean of the School of Media Studies at the New School….

So each week, a video presentation — typically a discussion with one, two or three thinkers about feminism and technology — will set a theme for the week. The first week’s video will feature Balsamo in a discussion with Judy Wajcman, a sociologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science whose 1991 book Feminism Confronts Technology led many feminist thinkers to focus more on technology issues. That video is designed to provide a historic overview. Subsequent weeks will feature discussions about more focused topics — feminism, technology and labor one week; feminism, technology and sexuality another, and so forth.

At participating colleges, professors will base their own courses on each weekly theme, sharing course materials and assignments, but customizing them for their own students. The courses will vary, as some are undergraduate and some are graduate, and the institutions (see list at right) vary widely by mission and geography — including institutions in Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States. The class sizes will be between 15 and 30 students each, decidedly non-massive. “There is another pedagogical commitment here,” Balsamo said. “Who you learn with is as important as what you learn. Learning is a relationship, not just something that can be measured by outcomes or formal metrics.”