Summer 2010: U.C. Berkeley: The Twentieth Century: Economies, Polities, Societies, and Technologies
Next summer's offerings: PEIS 160A under the more general rubric of PEIS 160: Political Economy in Historical Context
PEIS 160A Summer 2010 Draft Syllabus
PEIS 160A COCI Supplement for Online Courses
The different and interesting thing about this particular summer school offering is that--if we get our approval from COCI--we are going to be trying to do it online instead of in one of the lecture halls:
Live chat rooms, projects, real-world case studies, and interactions with your fellow students and instructors give you many ways to learn. Courses in a wide range of subjects—from the history of Islam to an introduction to statistics—ensure UC Berkeley Extension has the online education you want.
UC Berkeley Online from UC Berkeley Extension on Vimeo.
There are many potential benefits to doing courses online: time-shifting, place-shifting, eliminating the danger that the lecturer is simply having an off-day, the possibility of speeding-up the lecture so you can listen to it in half the time (at the price of having the lecturer by Alvin the Chipmunk), better integration of active learning computer and other calculation exercises with the course, et cetera.
There are also costs--which seem to me to be mostly connected to our East African Plains Ape nature as herd animals. I fear these costs may be very large and that as a result this may not work very well--if it did, after all, education would have been utterly transformed by Gutenberg, and it wasn't really.
But we are going to try, COCI willing and the crick don't riz...
