Course Evolution
VMI's core first-year survey — the course where most students encounter serious historical thinking for the first time.
After experimenting with active learning in my World History since 1500 course in Spring 2026, I plan to incorporate many more active-learning activities in Spring 2027. The challenge is doing this at scale with a first-year survey that serves a diversity of majors—so I am moving incrementally.
Globalization has been a major theme in World History since 1500, but it is often taught in an uncomplicated, teleological manner. The realities of living in the 21st century make this no longer feasible. This is especially true with the rise of LLMs and the potential challenges AI poses to various areas of modern life.
Testing a low-stakes assignment where students prompt an AI to summarize a chapter of their reading assignment that they have already read, then spend ten minutes annotating what it got right, what it flattened, and what it missed entirely. The goal is to build AI literacy while exposing the pitfalls of relying on the technology. This shows students the benefits of close reading as a skill that AI cannot replicate.
World History Since 1500 is a required course for all VMI first-years, which means it evolves in response to institutional changes as much as historiographical ones.
This was the first major course redesign in almost ten years of teaching World History since 1500. It was time for a refresh. There was still room for refinement in some of the lectures, but the material was much better. I was able to devote more time to the 20th and 21st centuries which my students really appreciated.
I chose to sacrifice geographical breadth in favor of topical depth this semester. I highly recommend *The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier* for anyone who wants a deeply personal account of Napoleon's fateful decision to invade Russia in 1812. students struggled with *Death of a Hero* and it has some slightly explicit material that might not be well-suited for all environments.
This was the first time I experimented with relying on a central topic for readings and discussions. This approach provided much more cohesion, and my students responded well to the challenge.
This semester was the first time I taught World History since 1500 online at VMI. I learned valuable lessons from the fall semester and implemented some new policies to make the online environment more productive. I also learned that while students enjoy reading novels, they struggle to analyze their themes and deeper meanings.
The adoption of the 6 C's of Primary Source Analysis worksheet was very successful. It helped my students understand what I meant by primary source analysis.
I maintained the Transatlantic Slave Trade assignment, but I abandoned all other attempts at bringing in the Digital Humanities. While it was a great idea, and I am still a fan of the diversity of projects, I simply did not have enough time to prepare them for the assignments in a survey course that required so much coverage. Student led discussion sessions worked really well and represented an early attempt at incorporating some active-learning strategies.
This was my first teaching job after receiving my Ph.D., and I was overly ambitious! I thought my students would love the Digital Humanities projects, but the activist poster was such a disaster that I ended up scrapping the assignment. The concept was good, but I did not build in enough time to prepare them for the assignments. I also overestimated their technological prowess.
I learned a lot from my first semester teaching, and I incorporated some of those changes into this syllabus. I experimented with short essays based on primary sources discussed in class, and I tried the class debates.
AI is not going anywhere, and I continued my experimentation with Google Gemini and Anthropic's Claude models this semester. Not all of my active learning activities worked well, but there is absolutely promise in this approach. I look forward to more fully implementing this approach the next time I teach the class.