“stealing” course curriculum
I have committed a good amount of premeditated academic banditry. Or I haven’t, who knows… If you were to “steal” a course curriculum, you would get a lot from it. It probably is the best way to learn a discipline or a topic. You can only go so far by googling about a subject and watching YouTube videos.
structure
Curricula 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 “novicery”. And usually it requires some background foundational knowledge to understand. The important centralizing knowledge is what is covered at the beginning and end of a curriculum. The “core concepts” of a discipline in both knowledge and practice are relatively hard to just “stumble upon”.
relevance
The second benefit is how 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 to the structure aspect is again the question of questions. Curricula 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 because 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 its students on its advising page. Having a curriculum will allow you to get a broad overview of the individual 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 university, 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 which ends with “.edu.” If there is a website, finding the syllabus becomes easy because you can search for the university’s edu domain and the course title.
The point of all this is to get the textbook name which the course uses.
3. Finding/Getting the Book
