On the midterm exam, in unit 6 of the course, you analyzed a specific website, largely in terms of style criteria. And because the web is so visual oriented, style considerations are extremely important. For example, rarely is green text on a black background successful on the web.
For your final exam, which you do in this unit of the course, you will now focus your analysis on the accuracy of the historical content of a popular historical website. Historical accuracy is absolutely critical. If the information is garbage or made-up or altered, it is useless from the point of view of historical analysis. Most users are all too eager to accept anything that is found on the web as the truth, as accurate, as reliable.
So, now you are going to have the opportunity to examine a popular history site and see if the material is actually reliable and accurate. It will take a bit of online research to assess the material that you find on your assigned website, but you have time as there is no time limit. You will complete the exam in the Canvas part of the course. I do recommend that you use both Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica in your work on the exam.
This (checking historical accuracy and authority) is something that you will routinely do when looking at any materials on the web. Just because a website is attributed to a historical organization or site (See the long list of local, Northern Virginia organizations on our Public History and Historic Preservation program blog, if the blog is still active.), does not mean that the actual information is any good.
MOOCs?
Thought that I'd include this in this unit.
Well, years ago there were MOOs and MUDs (links are to the Wikipedia entries), but now the latest hot product sweeping through the world of education (both higher and K-12) is the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), and everyone seems to be talking about MOOCs as the savior of higher education (and a great cost saving device at that). Supposedly the deal for students is free content, free learning, and for colleges and municipalities the deal is simply "free" (as if anyone can just read or listen to some things on the web and suddenly have "learned" something; the learning equation is certainly more complicated than that). Although, the MOOC wave may have crested. There are many variants of the MOOC out there already.
- MIT OpenCourseWare (weird that MIT can have open courses, but that all of the NVCC courses that use Canvas are closed).
- Now the Penn State world campus online is a more traditional online course set up, but still the fact that all major universities, including Michigan, Illinois, and the University of Virginia, are racing to establish an online presence these days shows that something is up and that the "model" of the university learning experience is being questioned. Somehow, since about 2000, the traditional university classroom has supposedly become too expensive (it all seems to be about money, not actually the issue of student learning). One wonders how states were able to fund public universities in the 1970s, which was hardly a decade of economic growth, but now suddenly in the 2010s, no one wants to fund public universities any longer.
- Western Governors University
- Coursera
- Open Courseware Consortium
- The Saylor Foundation
- Khan Academy
- As a result of my work on my Chancellor's Professor Fellowship, I have more commentary on MOOCs and their brethren. See MOOCs and teaching: does anyone really know what they are talking about
There are, of course, pros and cons associated with online education to begin with, and the MOOC brings yet another dimension to argue about those pros and cons. One is tempted to remember the fervor with which television swept through the educational establishment back in the 1970s (and then later VHS tapes). Students could just learn from watching some taped television programs.