Thanks in part to the much-vaunted Titanium Age of Television (or whatever it is these days), watching TV can feel like homework—the thing you do after getting back to the apartment not because it's fun, but to keep up with the conversation. However, more and more, TV is homework—beyond the deluge of college classes on The Wire, there are also courses delving into The O.C., Game of Thrones, and a full-on academic conference on Jersey Shore. And now, the pop culture course has merged with another trend bucking the standard way we think about college—massive open online courses (MOOCs), which attempt to expand access to education by presenting information and lectures entirely over the internet.

After offering a massively successful course on The Walking Dead in partnership with AMC, the University of California at Irvine is now teaming with FX to present "Fight or Die: The Science Behind FX's The Strain." The class, which will be taught through Instructure's MOOC platform Canvas Network, uses Carlton Cuse and Guillermo del Toro's horror series to connect a series of topics that Sarah Eichhorn, Associate Dean of Irvine's Distance Learning Center and one of the course's instructors, describes loosely as "hacking": parasites that control organisms, say, or the spread of diseases.

On its face, this should set off all sorts of red flags—a college class, taught in conjunction with a major television network? (The many, many problems with for-profit colleges spring to mind.) Additionally, in this case, the modules appear to be structured primarily as information dumps—a series of facts that could likely be obtained through basic research, without much in the way of feedback. (The "final projects" are meant to be evaluated by other students.) And that's before even considering the broader debate surrounding the effectiveness of MOOCs, which is, to say the least, unclear. Even within the Walking Dead course which paved the way for this one, the number of participants doesn't necessarily reflect full engagement with the material—it's easy to tout the self-reported numbers from students after the conclusion of the class, but harder to understand what kind of learning they actually reflect.

So the obvious, cynical reading is that "Fight or Die" exists for purely selfish reasons, that it's a plot for attention—for UC Irvine, for the professors trying to make their name on MOOCs, and above all for The Strain. (Some of the most important numbers in Irvine's post-Walking Dead MOOC survey are about students' increased enjoyment of the show.) On further investigation, though, this theory doesn't make much sense.

Most of the courses that created the trend of visible pop culture courses aren't coordinated branding efforts (that always comes later)—they're the efforts of overworked grad students, adjuncts, and professors attempting to teach the material they care about. Game of Thrones and Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City became the foci of classes because they inspire devotion. Though an oblivious few may presume their own academic success, for everyone else considering graduate school, the numbers are sobering.

People entering post-graduate academic life do so because, at least in part, they care deeply for their subject matter—they want to contribute to the body of research surrounding a topic, teach people about it, or simply spend a lot of time considering it. These courses—and MOOCs in general—don't fit with our understanding of what academia is "supposed" to be. Eichhorn describes the purpose of the course as avoiding that "glaze-over moment" when students begin to lose interest in serious topics. If classes like this are attempts to fix a deeply flawed system, is that such a bad thing?

Without any cost of entry to the course (or explicit branding from FX, which is providing clips from the series but not much more), the worst-case scenario seems to be that "Fight or Die" will simply fail at conveying the information it contains, just as with any lecture class. Still, the flip side of that requires students to be fans of the show, a pool that is likely not as deep as the instructors would like it to be. The Strain does well enough for itself, but it's not, like, The Walking Dead, one of the most-watched shows on the air. So if there's a reason to be suspicious of a Strain class, it's that it's too soon. Using a beloved show to sneakily get students interested in, say, medieval history? Sure. Zombie apocalypse? Go for it. But The Strain? Only time will tell.