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An April Fool’s Joke in November….

… from the usually staid Chronicle of Higher Education.

Read the whole thing. Do not miss the videos.

Because every paragraph of it is good, it’s hard for UD to choose an excerpt. I guess this is her favorite:

Here’s the course description of “General Humanities II,” taught by Michael Coker, an English instructor at Western Oklahoma. “We start with the Renaissance and move to the present,” he says in an online video. “We cover art, culture, society, religion, politics. The humanities is a very broad topic, and we cover essentially everything that leads up to our modern society, the ideas that inform our modern world.”

Sounds like a really interesting class — but seven centuries in 50 hours? That may seem daunting, Mr. Coker acknowledges. “But I’ve designed the class to be doable in 10 days,” he says in the video. “If you don’t have a lot going on in those 10 days, the class is not overly difficult.”

There’s only one downside to this writer having so outdone himself. You can already see his piece for next year:

Some accreditors have questioned whether a ten-minute course on the decline of the Roman Empire can really legitimately cover the material. “It sounds daunting,” acknowledges its instructor, “but if you don’t have a lot going on in those ten minutes, it’s a cinch.”

Margaret Soltan, November 13, 2012 6:02AM
Posted in: diploma mill

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3 Responses to “An April Fool’s Joke in November….”

  1. Polish Peter Says:
    November 13th, 2012 at 1:35PM

    As an archaeologist, I can attest that there are courses at many quite legitimate universities that cover the entirety of human prehistory (ca. 2 million years minus a couple millennia) in one 50 minute class in a World History survey. It’s really daunting, but if you don’t worry much about the details concerning 95%+ of human existence…well, don’t get me started. At the WOSU pace, you could probably cover human prehistory in about 30 seconds.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:
    November 13th, 2012 at 1:45PM

    Polish Peter: 30 seconds – LOL.

  3. Alan Allport Says:
    November 13th, 2012 at 4:59PM

    The course text is online.

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