Almost two years ago Ian Stuart (@islayian) and I sat in the audience of the Microsoft Partners in Learning Conference in Washington DC and listed to David Christian deliver a keynote presentation on Big History.
What I liked about David’s ideas the most is that in his own learning journey he has started to challenge what knowledge is important to teach. Like many teachers he started out teaching ‘depth’ but realised in the end that ‘breadth’ was just as important. Big History also challenges subject silos. In encourages people to take a more integrated look at science and humanities and realise that both have common ground and many parts of both curriculums are not very far apart.
Anyway the YouTube Video below explains Big History in a lot better way than I ever could:
After Washington Ian remained in contact with David and facilitated a conversation between him and Joe Wilson, Head of New Ventures at the SQA. Ian and Joe were keen to explore how we might get Scottish Schools involved in the pilot programme for 2012/2013 before the large scale worldwide rollout in 2013/2014. Joe and I also met with David when he visited Scotland in early 2012 and as a result of a lot of hard work from Joe (and others) combined with a personal recommendation from David. Scotland participated in the global Big History Pilot.
As we expected the pilot was a success and the Big History Course is now available for all schools and educators globally. There is also a public version of the course that will go live in September 2013.
The resources and learning tools built into the course (including the teachers dashboard) are really good and although it is currently only aligned to the US Common Core ELA standards for 9/10th grade, making links to CfE is not rocket science.
Lets hope that lots of Scottish School’s make use of this fab resource – you can use it as a complete course or just the bits that interest you!
Access the course materials and register for the course at - https://course.bighistoryproject.com