Half bizarre half unheard of fully creepy. A revelation about the online Coursera platform has people talking because apparently nobody sought permission to conduct the course in the first place. On Friday, reports emerged of a forensic anthropology course on the platform that uses the dead bones of Black children to help teach the class.
That is on the surface level where the problem begins. As local news reports in West Philly revealed today, the bones are actually those of two children who were killed back in 1985 when local police dropped bombs on a home belonging to a group then known as MOVE. The children did not survive the parents though appear to still be alive.
It gets worse. The Guardian reports that neither Coursera nor Princeton University (which is what the course appears under) ever sought permission to use the bones of the dead children (it is not clear if they were ever identified.)