Project Description:
The Great Conversation is a sequence of five courses that introduces the major epochs of Western civilization to students via great works of human achievement. Beginning with the study of the ancient Greeks and Hebrews, the program traces the evolution of literacy and artistic expression, philosophic thought, religious belief, and the sciences of human behavior into the modern world.
In this DHH project, accomplished in two phases in the summers of 2016 and 2017, veteran teachers within the program created a digital repository of teaching materials and syllabi gleaned from the many years of the program’s existence. The repository not only provides a rich collection of teaching materials, lesson plans, syllabi and other resources to academics teaching within the program, it also helps to convey and document the history and evolution of The Great Conversation at St. Olaf college.
The project was not merely a mass conversion of materials to digital form. It represents significant intellectual work in selecting what should be preserved, eliminating duplication, organizing it in a meaningful way, and creating metadata tags that reflect how the sequence is taught. This collection of syllabi, study questions, lectures, class activities, assignments, readings and illustrations is particularly useful to faculty new to the program, since they will be teaching across disciplines and therefore will sometimes find themselves outside their familiar expertise.
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