INDIAN CIVILIZATION: APPROACHING THE COURSE
LIB 210 is being delivered in the Winter 2021 semester with a synchronous format. We will meet regularly as a group via videoconferencing. We will start off the semester on a twice-a-week Tuesday-Thursday schedule, though we will soon move to once-weekly Thursday sessions for much of the semester. I will also make time available for one-on-one student-instructor videoconferences.
The emphasis will be on seminar discussion. I appreciate that the reading demands for this course are heavy, but It is important that you come to class having done your best to complete the weekly Reading and Viewing/Listening Assignments outlined in the syllabus for that week and that you be ready to participate in group discussion. The success of the class will depend not just upon the instructor's performance but upon your individual contributions. You should anticipate that you will need to spend a minimum of 5+ hours a week on your own engaged in study on LIB 210 to meet your course responsibilities.
Although I do not believe in regularly putting students on the spot and while I accept that there are extra reasons for privacy given our pandemic digital learning conditions, I far prefer a videoconference environment in which students choose to appear on camera and do their best to create a virtual community.
The books will be a central focus for class discussion. We will centre almost half of our class sessions around your responses to the required texts. You will need to purchase all four of those, including the coffee-table-sized Illustrated Mahabharata. All the books are available for purchase at the NIC Bookstore, though both the Rig Veda and Gandhi's Autobiography are available in e-text edition (Gandhi's book is available in a very inexpensive Kindle edition). I also have put three copies of Karen Armstrong's biography of the Buddha on Reserve in the NIC Library.
The Mister Dan site, my public access web-site, will be the basic resource for the course. (
https://www.misterdann.com/contentsreligioneastern.htm )We will using the NIC LIB 210 Blackboard site as the place for Discussion Forum Contributions and for Assignment Submissions. You will be able to reach the Blackboard site through logging on at https://learn.nic.bc.ca/ . The Blackboard Discussion Forums, however, are no substitute for in-class seminar discussion.
Before the start of each week, you should read the "Orientation For The Week" overview on the Syllabus page. It will outline your responsibilities for the coming week, including instructions for the Discussion Forums and for required Reading, Listening, and Viewing.
You will be writing commentaries upon each of the required course texts (Seminar Notes). You will also be expected to write weekly notes about the common curriculum materials (The Note Taking Assignment). One last project will be a small Powerpoint Presentation that you share with your fellow students in one of our class sessions.
LIB 210 is a demanding course, but one that takes you very seriously as a student and that invites you to grapple with some of the foundational ideas of one of the world's great civilizations. I hope that you enjoy the course and I look forward to working with you.