Course Materials
Advanced Placement World HistorySpringbrook High School Silver Spring, Maryland
Rather than offer a prepackaged course with a specific outline and disciplinary perspective, Prolarti's course materials offer a multidisciplinary and multimedia library of electronic tomes–primary documents, tutorials, lectures, scholarly debates, scholarly texts, portraits of scholars, laboratories, landmark experiments–designed to inspire intellectual curiosity and browsing and to produce serendipitous learning adventures. They are designed so that professors from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds can tailor the material to their own classrooms and course syllabi by taking from the shelves of the website the materials that are appropriate to a particular week's assignment, lecture, and/or class discussion.
Prolarti's course materials are designed to inspire a free–flowing inquiry of the material found in the tomes.
The portraits of scholars add a crucial dimension–a humanistic dimension–to the learning process. Within Prolarti's portraits, scholars present rigorous discussions of their research. They explain how their own cross-pollination of disciplines has helped to solve research problems. They reflect on how their age, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, social class and/or personal background have influenced or influences their research and careers. And, they mention how and where their research has had an impact on the field—challenged it and broadened it. Narrated by scholars themselves and illustrated with pictures of their work, the portraits offer an invitation into the private offices of scholars. They offer electronic mentoring, a method of personalizing what many students consider to be impersonal scholarship.