I’m Going To Columbia University…Kind Of

Experimenting with a MOOC

Because I want to better understand today’s society, I am going to take The Civil War and Reconstruction — 1850–1861: A Nation Divided, an online course taught by Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. The course is offered through the massive open online course (MOOC) provider, edX. In the introductory video, Foner says:

If you want to know where the world you’re living in came from, you need to know about the Civil War era. How the national state, the national government got to be as powerful as it it is; how we went from slavery to a period of great equality, and then a retreat from that into a period of considerable inequality. That helps to explain the civil rights movement, and in a certain sense helps to explain how we elected the first black president in American history.

While taking the course, I will be using this medium (pun-unintended) as a notebook. This should be fun.