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Year Long Course of Big History: why did we scrap this? Resources were supposed to be available in perpetuity.

Ben Tomlisson

Currently trying to navigate the new semester course and it is really frustrating as one of the original teachers from second intake onf 2012 and contributor of multiple materials to the course and having helped develop the WHP course. We have removed any coherent materials for year long teachers. Im currently in threshold 7 but in unit 5 struggling to find content and resources. We've been pretty much flying solo teaching this at our school since the new website launched.  Thresholds have been rewritten and simplified. For example the Modern Revolution intro cartoon removes any reference to political changes: it is more than a grab of fossil fuels and their environmental impact. Students doing year round Big History cannot access the new format and make sense of it. 

Resources developed by teachers who are invested in this programs have been modified and dumbed down without any consultation with those teachers. Kids at our school still love Big History, it is an ideal foundation for 9th graders and gives them critical thinking skills beyond that offered in traditional courses. The new materials offered are not at the same academic level, the new videos have no one fronting them, and are graphically not as good as, say Teded videos,  so how are these an improvement? Segments of podcasts with no visuals are not going to capture student attention. No embedding of claims testers? these were fundamental to the course. David Christian was a cult hero to our students, now they dont even know who he is. They should: he is the reason we have the course!  There is a significant group of teachers who are now mining youtube for videos and resources we were told would be available forever for free. To see the course turned into a semester course for middle school teachers is fine, it does feel like we're going after market share but to not support teachers who are still teaching year long big history feels wrong. The intention of this project was to create the most interesting history course out there, I m not sure we're coming close to that anymore. 

Ben Tomlisson  Post

Parents

  • Hey  !

    I understand your frustration and it's a big change going from a high school course that you've taught for years to a middle school version that's the most prominent one on the site right now. We do, however, still have the high school version of the course on our site this year.

    The idea behind creating a middle school Big History course was to inspire younger students to see how this interdisciplinary story of the history of the Universe helps to provide a framework for everything they will learn as they move from middle school to high school and beyond. David's narrative is still front and center but it's presented in language that younger students will understand. In creating the middle school materials, we knew that we had to shorten the original David videos to work with an audience with shorter attention spans who are used to mainly Ted-Ed style educational videos rather than talking heads. We do have many new videos in the course created in conjunction with Complexly (Crash Course) that feature animation, for example the Big Bang, Egypt, Persians and Greeks, Climate History and Our Future, Space: The Final Threshold?, etc. We also still have claim testers woven throughout the new course--students are introduced to them in Lesson 1.4 and the activity progression continues in Lessons 2.3, 2.6, 3.3, 4.5, and 6.5.

    You can also still access all of the current (high school) course materials via Google Drive and save those to Google Classroom or your school's preferred LMS. These materials will always be available for teachers, and the older videos will also still be accessible on our YouTube channel--we can share links once we collect them all in one spot.

    Let me know if you have additional questions and I'll be happy to answer or find someone who can answer them for you.

    Bridgette

Reply

  • Hey  !

    I understand your frustration and it's a big change going from a high school course that you've taught for years to a middle school version that's the most prominent one on the site right now. We do, however, still have the high school version of the course on our site this year.

    The idea behind creating a middle school Big History course was to inspire younger students to see how this interdisciplinary story of the history of the Universe helps to provide a framework for everything they will learn as they move from middle school to high school and beyond. David's narrative is still front and center but it's presented in language that younger students will understand. In creating the middle school materials, we knew that we had to shorten the original David videos to work with an audience with shorter attention spans who are used to mainly Ted-Ed style educational videos rather than talking heads. We do have many new videos in the course created in conjunction with Complexly (Crash Course) that feature animation, for example the Big Bang, Egypt, Persians and Greeks, Climate History and Our Future, Space: The Final Threshold?, etc. We also still have claim testers woven throughout the new course--students are introduced to them in Lesson 1.4 and the activity progression continues in Lessons 2.3, 2.6, 3.3, 4.5, and 6.5.

    You can also still access all of the current (high school) course materials via Google Drive and save those to Google Classroom or your school's preferred LMS. These materials will always be available for teachers, and the older videos will also still be accessible on our YouTube channel--we can share links once we collect them all in one spot.

    Let me know if you have additional questions and I'll be happy to answer or find someone who can answer them for you.

    Bridgette

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