5 College Classes You'll Wish You Could Take


Remember that viral video in December of an eagle picking up a baby? Turns out, there was no cause for concern — the video was created by three university students at the Centre NAD in Montreal.

Don't feel bad if you were one of the millions of people tricked into thinking the event actually happened — the video was well made. And the students earned an "A" for their project.

But this raises another question — what class are these students taking these days? Turns out there are a lot of new classes at universities around the U.S. that have to do with social media, viral videos and what most people might classify as "fun work." But creating content for the internet, whether serious or silly, is big business.

Antoine Seigle, Normand Archambault, LoÃ¯c Mireault and FÃ©lix Marquis-Poulin are the four students who created the eagle video for a production simulation workshop class at Centre NAD. The students are pursuing bachelors degrees in 3D Animation and Digital Design.

Check out these other digital, tech and pop-culture classes at universities in the U.S.:

Georgetown University offers Philosophy and Star Trek. The course has been around since 2004, and addresses questions such as:

I. Is time travel possible? Could you go back and kill your ancestor? What is time?
II. What is the relation between your mind and your brain—are they separate items or identical? Can persons survive death? Could a machine someday think? Is Data a person?
III. What is a person? Must you have the same body to be you? Same memories? When do we have one person, and when do we have two (think of the episodes where people "split" or "fuse").

Pitzer College has a course called, "Learning from YouTube" in its Media Studies program. This course is explained like this:

What can YouTube teach us and is this how, what and all weâ€™d like to learn? Over its hundred year history, radical media theorists have looked with utopian zeal to a moment in the media future which turns out to be upon us: a time where access to the production and distribution of media is democratically available outside channels organized by capital. So why is the technology being used primarily to spoof mainstream media forms and what does this tell us about the media, our society and political possibility?

Social Media and Virtual Communities is a class at Emory Goizueta Business School.


The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University offers a class called "Human-Robot Interaction." The description in the course book says:


The Institute also offers a class called, "Robot Ethics," which could also be called, "Don't make an evil robot."

Learn about GPS at MIT in the course titled, "GPS: Where are you?"

The use of Global Positioning System (GPS) in a wide variety of applications has exploded in the last few years. In this seminar we explore how positions on the Earth were determined before GPS; how GPS itself works and the range of applications in which GPS is now a critical element.

If you don't live near a college, or if you work full time and don't have time to take a class, remember you can learn most of this stuff on YouTube.

Did your university offer any niche classes that were of-the-time? Or, are you currently taking any classes that would fit into this post? Tell us in the comments.

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto hocus-focus

Load Comments

What's New

What's Rising

What's Hot