The new semester-long Western civilization course that all undergraduate students must take beginning this fall is a whirlwind course that will be taught in more than 40 sections and will cover 2,000 years of history from ancient times to the present. The History and Art History Department was charged with developing this portion of the new general education requirements.

"We could have had the faculty teach everything, but we would have gutted the graduate program, and we would have packed 500 students into a lecture hall," says Marion Deshmukh, associate professor of history and the project coordinator. Instead, the department chose to maintain small classes of no more than 25 students by employing an innovative, multimedia approach that highlights active learning exercises to encourage student interaction with the faculty. T. Mills Kelly, a historian who is exploring how the World Wide Web enhances student learning, has joined George Mason and will oversee the Western civilization course.

The course is built around a series of 13 lectures. Over the summer, professors taped lectures based on their area of expertise with the help of GMU-TV. The professors used visuals incorporating more than 1,000 images, as well as PowerPoint presentations. "So the professor's not just a talking head," says Deshmukh. Students can record the lectures from GMU-TV broadcasts, buy the tapes in the bookstore, or watch them in the library before attending their weekly discussion sessions taught by History and Art History faculty.

During the discussion sections, students will read and analyze primary source historic documents and materials relating to that week's multimedia lecture. Faculty will meet monthly to discuss and assess the use of the primary documents thanks to a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The small discussion sections will encourage interaction with the faculty. The course will also take advantage of WebCT, an online course management system that allows professors to set up a home page for the course where students and faculty can interact and leave messages.

In addition to the course work, several cocurricular activities are planned to support the course, including a film festival with movies such as Gladiator and the play, Nathan the Wise, which the Theater of the First Amendment will perform in November.

The small classes, multimedia lectures, WebCT, textbook, and a reader of historical documents rounds out all of the tools the History and Art History Department has used to put together this innovative program. "It address different learning styles," says Deshmukh. "We will assess the progress of the program as it goes along and make modifications."