Notes on The Final Exam

Blue bar

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For your final exam, which you do in this unit of the course, you will now focus your analysis on the accuracy of the historical content of a popular historical website.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), 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 wiki 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:


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.