Course Evolution
VMI's core first-year survey — the course where most students encounter serious historical thinking for the first time.
After experimenting with active learning in my World History since 1500 course in Spring 2026, I plan to incorporate many more active-learning activities in Fall 2026. The challenge is doing this at scale with a first-year survey that serves hundreds of students — the logistics are very different from an upper-division seminar, so I am starting incrementally.
VMI students are, unsurprisingly, interested in military history. I am considering weaving more explicit connections between the civilizations we study and their military institutions and conflicts — not to turn this into a military history course, but to leverage that existing interest as a gateway into broader social, economic, and cultural analysis. The Roman legions become a lens for understanding citizenship; Mongol logistics become a lens for understanding steppe ecology.
Testing a low-stakes assignment where students use an AI chatbot as a "writing tutor" for their primary source analyses — then write a reflection on what the AI got right, what it missed, and what they learned about the source that the AI could not grasp. The goal is to build AI literacy and critical thinking simultaneously, not to pretend it does not exist.
HI 103 is a required course for all VMI first-years, which means it evolves in response to institutional changes as much as historiographical ones.
After teaching the World History survey nearly every year since receiving my Ph.D., I had grown bored with most of the lectures, so I decided to spend the summer rewriting every lecture thinking about advances in the historiography and what we wanted our students to get out of this core curriculum course. It was remarkably successful. Unsurprisingly, the students absolutely loved the reading about the First Crusade.
While ChatGPT appeared in Fall 2022, this was the first semester I really noticed students using ChatGPT, and I was thoroughly unprepared for how it would affect my teaching. I also decided it was time to change the participation grade to give students who were reluctant to speak in class an opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of the course readings. This was a successful experiment, and it had the added benefit of forcing engagement with the reading before discussions.
This was a semester of adjustments and flexibility. I had to learn how to teach in person at a military college where students are in uniform, first-year students are "Rats" until they break out, section marchers call class to attention at the beginning of classes, and students are required to miss classes for guard duty.
This semester was largely about survival. I had been hired in late July/early August to teach online courses that Fall because of COVID-19. World History at VMI is part of the required core curriculum, and, in an attempt to ensure all students have a similar experience, it is quite regimented.
The adoption of the 6 C's of Primary Source Analysis worksheet was very successful. It helped my students understand what I meant by primary source analysis.
I refined the Digital Humanities assignments but made them less heavily weighted while adding a requirement that students present and lead our primary source discussion sessions at least once during the semester. I abandoned secondary-source readings in favor of a greater emphasis on targeted primary sources.
This was my first teaching job after receiving my Ph.D., and I was overly ambitious! I thought my students would love the Digital Humanities projects, but the interactive timeline of Roman history was an unmitigated disaster. The concept was good, but I did not build in enough time to prepare them for the assignments. I also overestimated their technological prowess.
I relied on textbooks and document readers to do the heavy lifting. I also experimented with holding class debates, which did not work as well as I had hoped due to insufficient preparation.
ChatGPT and the proliferation of LLMs that followed forced every instructor's hand on assessment design. I decided that I needed to start learning more about AI rather than sticking my head in the sand and hoping it would go away. I used AI to help me craft more AI-resistant writing prompts, and while not foolproof, I had great success. The one casualty of the rise of AI was the pre-class written discussion session assignments — these were just too easy for AI to generate quickly.