I don't have time to write today, because my online course started and I have to write a bunch of stuff for that. So instead of an entry, I've decided to post my syllabus here. Yeah, I know...
Zzzzzzzz...
Course Description:
I first taught the "[NAME OF COURSE]" course when I was a full-time physics professor at the [COLLEGE I WAS STUPID ENOUGH TO LEAVE]. The intent of the course was to present a historical view of the science of astronomy, and to examine how our picture of the universe we live in has changed throughout human history. The course was a great success, and so when I moved on from the [JOB I DIDN'T HATE] to my current job, I was asked to continue teaching the class as an online course. I did this for the first time last semester. It was a dismal failure.
The reasons for this are varied, but the main reason was that the online discussions just did not progress quickly enough to allow us to cover all the material. I would post some questions and 2 days later a couple of people would post responses, then I would answer those responses, and all of a sudden it's takes us an entire week to cover an idea that I could have explained in 15 minutes in a traditional course. Clearly, the model I was using for the online course - I post a reading and some lecture notes and some questions and we all discuss them - was not working.
So, in thinking about how to conduct the course this semester, the goal was... to make sure there was always something going on in the discussion groups, and to give the STUDENTS more responsibility for bringing the "content" into the discussions. The model I've come up with is one in which there will be 10-12 forums, each devoted to a particular topic. These topics will range from ancient and Renaissance astronomy to black holes, the Big Bang, and extraterrestrial life. Rather than taking a sequential approach to the history of astronomy, we will take a parallel approach. Each forum will explore a particular period in our understanding of the cosmos, and over the course of the semester, we should develop a fairly complete picture of how this understanding has developed over time.
The Forums
Each forum will have two to three student "moderators". Your job as the moderators of a forum is to make sure the discussions in your forum keep moving, by posting interesting content and posing questions to myself and to the rest of the class. Each moderator should be posting something to his or her forum no less often than every other day. Everyone should be reading and posting to ALL of the forums at all times. This sounds like a lot of work, but I expect that not all forums will have high volumes of traffic at all times. It'll be my job to keep track of the discussions, to make sure no factually incorrect information is leaking through, and to point everyone in the direction of resources that will help you to get the information you need. It may get a little chaotic at times, and it may be hard to keep up with all the discussions in all the forums, but the alternative is having a discussion on a single topic that moves at a snail's pace because everyone is waiting for someone ELSE to post a message.
Resources
I'm not going to require a textbook for this course. Instead, I'll post a set of weblinks to good internet resources that I will keep updated over time as you all provide links to materials you come across on the web. I will also post a HUGE library of primary source material from Aristotle, Plato, Copernicus, Galileo... that will particularly help the historical discussion forums. I shouldn't have to say it, but I will... anytime you pull a chunk of text from a webpage or anywhere else, you need to CITE YOUR SOURCE appropriately.
Time
I expect you'll spend a couple of hours almost every day working on the course, between looking up resources, composing posts and questions, and reading all the forums. If this seems like a lot, remember, in an online course the workload is compensating for those hours we are NOT spending sitting in a classroom, PLUS the homework and other work outside of class.
Grades
Your grade will be based almost entirely on your posts to the discussion forums. One third of your grade will be based on the quality and frequency of your posts to the forum you jointly moderate. One third will be based on your posts to the other forums. And one third will be based on a comprehensive final paper, the details of which will follow sometime around midterm.
You will receive midterm reports around the halfway point of the semester informing you of your grade up to that point, with suggestions on anything you might need to do in order to improve your grade.
I should also mention that the [CLUNKY ONLINE INTERFACE] allows me to track how many posts you have read. I'll be making spot-checks every few weeks to see that everyone is reading and keeping up with new posts.
Final Thoughts
This method of teaching a class is a HUGE departure for me, personally. I'm not a big fan of discussion-based courses in general. I'm a scientist. We scientists like to LECTURE!! But that doesn't really work very well in an online course, so I'm hoping this little experiment will be a success.
Astronomy is one of my favorite subjects to teach, and I think teaching the HISTORY of astronomy is a good way to get a complete picture of our modern view of our place in the universe. Hopefully, over the course of the semester, such a complete picture will begin to emerge for us.
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