Let's face it: most school assignments don't make sense in today's world. When will you ever have to sit in a room without references and write down everything you know about a topic that you'll probably never need to know anything about ever again? Bosses aren't going to pay 10 people to hand write every word of reports when one person who knows how to use AI effectively can use data management skills to generate more detailed and insightful ones in 10% of the time.
Consider what you want your future to look like:
- are trying to be the one managing the AI instead of being replaced by it?
- do you want to be able to independently figure out which sources of information you can trust?
- do you believe employers are hiring people for their ability to nod appreciatively while their manager spoon feeds them information for a worksheet?
If your answers were Yes, Yes, and No, our History courses are for you. We take a completely different approach that puts students in charge of guiding their own learning while helping them develop the skills to weed out bad information and draw informed conclusions.
The Power of Stories
Which do you remember better: the facts you read in a textbook, or the "facts" from a based-on-a-true-story movie?
One of the most powerful ways to learn about a topic is to turn it into a coherent narrative: Things were like this at first, then something happened, and here is the result. By organizing the course around this "one weird trick", students will remember the things they learned in class as easily as the (often incorrect) details from those movies. By following the same character over the duration of the course, the events of History have a more personal meaning which lasts longer than cramming a few facts for a test.
The most fun part of this course is that students get to guide a character through the trials and tribulations of the 20th century. The story you start with is fairly bare-bones: It gives you some details about events which happen to your character, but it's up to you to turn it into something truly personal and meaningful to you. Here are a couple of examples of the types of story you will customize for yourself:
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Course Overview
The world has changed dramatically in the last few years. With the availability of new technologies, totally new styles of learning are now possible. Here is how we help students take a more active and creative role in their learning:
- At the beginning of the course, you will be provided with a list of research questions (and you can add your own if there's a topic of particular interest to you), as well as a description of a totally unique character. The largest component of the course is answering these questions by doing self-directed research that also helps to guide the life of your character.
- Every day, you select one or more questions and do some research using search engines or AI, and:
- assess the quality of the sources you looked at
- create a multiple-choice quiz question based on your research
- use the information you've gathered to co-write the next "year" of your story using AI
- Our AI assistant will use the information you provided, as well as some statistially-accurate details we provide, to add to your story, which you then use to research your next set of questions.
Throughout the course, you will also explain your story to someone you know while teaching them about an important historical topic, complete some of the student-created multiple choice quizzes, and make social media-style videos that explain important items or events.
At the end of the course, you will have a story that follows a family (or maybe more than one, if your original character's doesn't survive!) through the events of the course, you will have a much better understanding of how to identify information you can trust on search engines, and you will better understand how to structure AI prompts to get the output you want. If those sound like the skills you think will best support your learning, this is the course for you.
If you're ready to take control of your own education and prepare for the 2030s instead of the 1990s, you can sign up below and be learning the next day!