Intercollegiate Sports in America, 1900-2021

Spring 2021





Requirements and Grades

Requirements

This course requires students to read, write, and discuss. In this course we have no tests, no specific set of facts, names, or dates that everyone must know. Instead, we have a series of topics, readings, and a variety of methods for discussing what we know and learn. I provide a perspective on college athletics at the beginning of each week accompanied by a set of PDF slides based on my own experience and reading. This material is equivalent to what we would do for the lecture portion of an in-person version of this course. You provide your perspectives as well, based on your experiences, the material in the introduction and slides, and on the required and other readings for the class. We all post comments to the Attendance Discussion Forum and the Reading Discussion Form that begins with the third week of class that demonstrate that we have have read, learned, and experienced college sports.

While there are many different ways to approach college sports and many valid opinions that may not always coincide, logic, information, and data should inform our judgments and explanations. The best comments use the class introduction and slides, the readings, and other information explicitly to make the case or to provide illustrations. In many ways this course is similar to a history colloquium where we read, write, and discuss. As you will see below, the grade in this course is a reflection of your constant involvement with the topics identified for each week. The grade shows that you were involved every week, that you wrote interesting and thoughtful posts to our discussion forums; posts that engaged a issue relevant to the week's topics, used the weekly introduction and slides, and, beginning with the third week, the readings.

History is a discipline of reading, writing, and discussion. Committed to the disciplined discussion of past events and their significance, historians accumulate, analyze, write about, and discuss information with their colleagues. In this class we do all of this. And through Moodle, we participate in discussion and follow the class weekly introductions and presentations, and the reading.

Grades

Class engagement reflected in the Attendance Forum for each week's class introduction and accompanying presentation [a substitute for attendance at the in-person class], counts 30%, and the Discussion Forum participation and quality based on readings from weeks 3 through 13 counts 70%.

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