Welcome to this Big History course! In this course, renowned scientists and scholars from the University of Amsterdam and beyond will take you on a journey from the Big Bang until today while addressing key questions in their fields. After completing this journey you will have developed a better understanding of how you and everything around you became the way they are today. You will also have gained an understanding of the underlying mechanisms that have helped shape the history of everything and how they wil help shape the future. Last but not least, you will have developed the skill to use this knowledge to put smaller subjects into a bigger perspective with the aid of the little big history approach, which can help you develop some new ideas on these smaller subjects.
by
Kristina
completed this course and found the course difficulty to be easy.
This course lays out some nice ideas about connecting knowledge. The instructors are nice nad knowledgeable. However, giving lecture about various things such as the origin of chemical elements up to the agricultural development seems like a nice way of looking at things, but this only scratches the surface of the needed knowledge for such an approach. I would suggest focusing on one topic, and connecting it with the context and similar events. All in all, a nice course.
by
Tanja
is taking this course right now, spending 4 hours a week on it and found the course difficulty to be medium.
I really loved the professors at University of Amsterdam. I've been out of school for 25 years and while this was quite technical for me, I found I could get a lot out of it. However, I had to drop out because I was so frustrated with the grading of the quizzes: for an 8-question multiple choice test, there was not one point per question. Instead, there was ANY combination of correct answers within the four (or even five?) possible choices for EACH question; in other words, multiple choices were possible within the framework of only one question., and it was graded according to each bubble …
I really loved the professors at University of Amsterdam. I've been out of school for 25 years and while this was quite technical for me, I found I could get a lot out of it. However, I had to drop out because I was so frustrated with the grading of the quizzes: for an 8-question multiple choice test, there was not one point per question. Instead, there was ANY combination of correct answers within the four (or even five?) possible choices for EACH question; in other words, multiple choices were possible within the framework of only one question., and it was graded according to each bubble you filled out or did not fill out PER QUESTION. The questions were indeed not for the layperson - I would have had to review each lecture, perhaps many times, to decipher the correct answer for some of the questions, and this was not my intent with this course. I felt the questions were far too specific for the way the material was covered. I did not come in remembering anything about neutrons or positrons, etc., and while this was quickly covered in one lecture, and I took good notes, I could not answer the multiple-option question correctly. A pity because I really loved where the host professor was going with her attempt to cross disciplines in this field.