“Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse – Disasters, Catastrophes, and Human Behavior” is an award-winning class taught online every summer at MSU. 

Human geography junior Richard Wetzel said the course discusses disasters and catastrophes and how well people respond and retain their humanity in these situations. 

After the first week, Wetzel said the class is put into a simulation which is based in the zombie apocalypse. 

“The academic content is anchored in a story, a narrative, the students become a part of that story,” Glenn Stutzky, the course instructor, said, “and we’re finding that their motivation … appears to be more engaging and stronger.” 

Stutzky actually becomes part of the story, the course’s instructional designer Keesa Johnson said, adding the narrative is teaching the classes objectives, as opposed to a lecture. 

Stutzky said the course started as a response to the college of social work looking for interesting electives to appeal to students of all majors. 

“I’ve always been interested in how people behave,” Stutzky said, “in particular how people behave during disasters and catastrophes.” 

Stutzky got the idea to include zombies through searching the website for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. When he went to one page, there was a zombie girl peering through venetian blinds. 

“It was actually my grandson who … gave me some of the best teaching advice I ever got, and he just said, ‘Gramps, just don’t be boring,’ and I thought, ‘Well, zombies are interesting,’” Stutzky said. 

Johnson was assigned to work with Stutzky for the course, and she pulled in another instructional designer, Christopher Irvin. 

“Glenn came to us with his vision, what he wanted … and I wanted to make it come to life,” Johnson said, adding that’s why she sought out Irvin for the course. 

They all wanted to do something different for the course, Johnson said, so they essentially made a movie-style trailer. Stutzky said it was the first college course in the country with a trailer, and it generated interest in popular culture. 

Stutzky said they are trying to expand this course to South America and China. 

Wetzel said some of the members of his six-person team are in China, so the group communicates mostly through an online group chat. He said all the groups are scattered in different places around the area, and his group is in a church in East Lansing. 

The church’s power is out, Wetzel said, and his team is currently focused on gathering supplies and barricading their location. The locations groups are trapped in are all real-life places, so Wetzel said he went to the church to get the layout of it. 

“I think I could get by with putting in less time, but it is interesting, so I’m getting really into it,” Wetzel said. “I think it’s fascinating, I think it’s been an enjoyable experience.” 

Johnson said the simulation immerses students using social media, communication, and teamwork. The groups also have to choose a leader who sends in a video report each week, Stutzky said. 

“Leadership skills are being developed and critical analysis, because they have to do a lot of reflection in making a lot of decisions and choices,” Johnson said. 

Once students become part of the story, they begin to add onto it, Stutzky said, and the role-playing simulation requires students to watch a new video, made by Stutzky, which relays what the challenge for that week is. 

“They have to make a fateful decision that at the end will take them down one path or down another,” Stutzky said. 

Wetzel is taking the course because he plans to have a career is disaster relief, but he think zombies are popular in our culture because people see the zombie apocalypse as an event they would be able to survive, whereas other apocalyptic settings may have lower survival rates. 

Stutzky said the course idea is all their original work and everyone who helped create the course acts as co-instructors. 

“I think sometimes in education we’ve just gotten lazy, it’s like, ‘Well, we’ve got important material, we’ve got books’, but the bottom line of it is that these students have to take the class no matter what,” Stutzky said, adding a challenge to instructors to ask themselves who would really show up if their course wasn’t required. 

“We’re trying to take a whole different … type of approach,” Stutzky said, “education is a good product and as such it should be advertised.”