Inter-domain courses bring topics from two different domains into one cohesive course. Students explore a subject from two different perspectives and contexts. Our course, Rocks, Minerals and the History of Art, successfully combined geoscience and art history. Come learn what worked for us as we designed, developed and deployed it.
Penn State recently updated undergraduate general education requirements to include 6 credits of Integrative Studies. Students can choose from two types of Integrative Studies courses - linked courses and inter-domain courses. Linked courses match two courses that approach the same or related subjects from two different knowledge domains. Inter-domain courses bring topics from two different knowledge domains together into one cohesive course. In a report to Penn State’s Faculty Senate, the Special Senate Committee noted: “Integrative Studies courses will have a distinctive intellectual dimension. Because they ask the student to consider a topic from the perspective of two different general education knowledge domains, they will advance the student’s ability to comprehend things from multiple perspectives, to see connections, and to grasp the concept that one must employ different modes of thinking, different epistemologies to understand fully the nature of things — one domain is not fully equal to the task of understanding the world around us.”
The course proposal for our course, Rock, Minerals and the History of Art, was approved in 2017. The course is concerned with the very stuff from which art is made, a topic that does not tend to be covered in detail in most art history courses. Similarly, geoscientists do not often address the works of art and architecture made from the materials they study. The linkage here is clear: raw material and product, and it presents opportunities for much wider analysis, for example the value of provenancing materials used in works of art and architecture, the means by which artists have obtained and manipulated materials in order to produce works of art, the characteristics of earth materials that make them desirable for inclusion in such works, economic matters of mining, trade, and monetary value, and so on.
Rock, Minerals and the History of Art was designed and developed by two teams, one from the College of Earth and Mineral Science and one from the College of Arts and Architecture. The fully online course was co-taught for the first time during Spring 2019 with plan to offer it again in Fall 2019. The feedback that the faculty received from students after the first offering was very positive. One student emailed early in the semester remarking how she felt that all courses should be taught as inter-domain because it is awesome to see how everything fits together which echos what the Special Senate Committee noted in their report. She continued by saying that the course was so fun too. An online course was fun! Doesn’t every faculty member and learning designer dream of hearing that sometime in the career! Needless to say, we were all thrilled.
There was a lot that happened between when the course proposal was accepted and when that student made our day to get us to this point, however. Our presentation will explore the path that the team took to get here. We learned a lot along the way and will share some best practices that we think makes a relationship like this work including how we distributed the workload as we designed, developed, and delivered the course, what we used to keep track of all of the working parts, how we communicated, and what the course looks today.
Learning Outcomes
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Take away some lessons learned
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Review tools we tried and tools we used
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Explore the course design
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Discuss the revision