Elizabethtown College has received a grant to develop two new online upper-level humanities courses from the Council of Independent Colleges. Dr. David Kenley, associate professor of history, and Dr. Jeffery Long, professor of religion and Asian studies, will both teach a course during the spring 2015 semester.
Kenley will be instructing “Contemporary China,” which will provide an overview of Chinese history from 1976 to the present. “I know that doesn’t sound contemporary to a lot of people, but from a historian’s perspective, that’s pretty contemporary,” he said.
Long will teach “Indian Philosophy,” a course that he described as an in-depth examination of “the Indian philosophical traditions and the various views they have and also the debates with one another.” While the new courses are taught online, Long said he hopes “to make it as much like a classroom experience as possible in terms of the information content.”
Like other upper-level humanities courses offered at Etown, both new online courses will require textbook reading and a research project, but the difference, according to Kenley, is that the courses will be “asynchronous.” In other words, students will be able to work relatively at their own pace through the course. “Each week, the whole class will be working on the same material, but there will be very few times where everybody needs to be logged on at the same time,” Kenley said. Long emphasized that the classes are formatted to “maximize the convenience to students” and are set up so students can access the course anytime. “If they want to do the interactive part at 3:00 a.m., they can!” he said.
The Council for Independent Colleges has provided similar grants to 20 other liberal arts colleges. Like Etown, each will develop two new online humanities courses. The participating colleges will pilot the online courses starting in spring semester of 2015 and each college will make their courses available to the other 19 schools the next spring. “We’re getting a grant to develop two new courses, but, in a year, our students here will have the option of 40 new courses in which to enroll, which I’m guessing will probably double the number of humanities courses offered here,” Kenley said. “The humanities disciplines have probably been slower to utilize online teaching than some other disciplines, so [the grant] was a way to encourage humanities to teach online,” he added.
“In January, we will teach these classes for the first time, and I think they will go great, but it is the first time so there is going to be a little bit of a learning curve,” Kenley said. Long also thinks that the course will be successful. “If it’s a popular course, and the students want it more often, then we might be able to look into doing it every year,” Long said. Students can register for “Contemporary China” and “Indian Philosophy” on Jayweb the same way they would a traditional Etown course. Course registration begins Monday, Nov. 10.
