“stealing” course curriculum

I have committed a good amount of premeditated academic banditry throughout my time at college. Or I haven’t who knows… The point I want get across though is that if you were to “steal” a course curriculum, you would get a lot from it and it probably is the best way to learn a discipline or a topic.

There is only so far you can go by looking up interesting topics about a subject and checking out textbooks on it. That is to say you can go actually pretty far by doing so. Mainly because you are probably both “doing” and “reading” the textbook at the same time. This is why video guides are so effective for most forms of learning.

So when would stealing a curricula be beneficial?

structure

The main benefit I see is that curriculums are designed for the “student”. A curriculum makes careful assumptions of what the student has learned so far, their “declarative knowledge”, but also what they have practiced and encountered so far, their “tacit knowledge”.

Most of the time when I look up interesting subjects, the articles and such make no assumption of that. And it is usually the case that it requires some background foundational knowledge to understand. That foundational knowledge is usually what is covered at the beginning and end of a curriculum. The “core concepts” of a discipline in both knowledge and practice is something that is relatively hard to just “stumble upon”.

relevance

The second benefit is that it is defined to be “vocationally useful”. Normally a college curriculum includes key sections where the question of “work” comes in and how the discipline is done in the world. Of course this may not apply in most cases where all you want to do is to pick up how to use some sort of skill.

Another part of the relevance aspect and a bit tied in to the structure aspect, is again the question of questions. Curriculums tend to contain old and new texts with the goal of making clear the “foundational problems” of a discipline and what the history of it all looks like. So it’s relevant in the sense that history is always relevant in how it has informed and produced the current state.

my process of “stealing”

1. Finding The Curriculum

Any university probably has some kind of course curriculum for their students on their advising page. Having a curriculum will allow you to get a broad overview of the indivual courses a student would take for their major. Another valid method is finding some community based outline, which If I remember there are many on GitHub.

2. Finding the Courses

After you have selected a given unversity, the make or break part here is being able to find the syllabus for a given university course.

Usually it is possible to find the syllabus if the university has some kind of web-hosting service for the professors that end with “.edu.” If that is the case, finding the syllabus becomes pretty esay just by google searching for the university’s edu domain and the course title.

The point of all this is to get the textbook name that the course uses.