Course Previews for Partners
The following courses are a sample of Confluence Courseware available for our partners’ review. Each preview will open a new page with the course embedded for your review.
Confluence Courseware, LLC partners with pioneering creators who aspire to deliver the best of a traditional liberal arts curriculum using a conversational pedagogy to anyone, anywhere, anytime. It is a space where scholars and educators collaborate with each other under the guidance of highly experienced classical educators, educational entrepreneurs and courseware creators to monetize their creations through a royalty stream. The intention is to provide great books curriculum through digital delivery to any B2B partner, school or student that desires it.
The concept includes aggregating content at a lower than industry cost by using courseware creators’ original works of authorship, building on the prior works of Confluence Creators, works in the public domain, and those freely accessible Open Educational Resources (OER). Courseware Creators will normally hold an advanced degree (doctorate required for developing collegiate level courseware), enjoy a background in teaching, scholarship and curriculum design and enthusiasm for its applications on a digital platform. Our team can deliver a course as is, revise, edit, combine or expand existing courses, or create original courseware according to a customer’s specifications. We exist to meet your curricular need.
Exploring the Great Ideas in History from Ancient Times to 1650
This course is a survey of Western human history and explores simultaneously relevant Great Ideas in each chapter. It explores the social, political, religious, intellectual and artistic achievements from the earliest human civilizations to the age of exploration. Beginning with the ancient near east the course progresses chronologically through the classical period of the Greeks and Romans, the emergence and rise of the Christian faith, the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation and concludes with a study of the age of discovery. The syntopical or synthesis based exploration of the Great Ideas makes this course much more than a study of the facts of thousands of years of history. Rather by tracing Great Ideas throughout it becomes a means to discover and revive intellectual traditions.
Exploring the Great Ideas in History from 1450 to Date
Course Description: This course is a survey of Western human history and explores simultaneously relevant Great Ideas in each chapter. It explores the social, political, religious, intellectual and artistic achievements from the age of exploration to the present day. Beginning with the European discovery of the new world, this course proceeds through the rise of European Monarchy and a form of globalization, the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, political revolution and Napoleon, to the industrial revolution, romanticism, realism and through the world wars and on into the twenty first century. The syntopical or synthesis based exploration of the Great Ideas makes this course much more than a study of the facts of thousands of years of history. Rather by tracing Great Ideas throughout it becomes a means to discover and revive intellectual traditions.
A course virtual text package that will serve as a general interdisciplinary “review” of the Western intellectual and historical tradition.
Simply put, the Humanities study human culture throughout the world from the first moment of human existence until the present. Because all of cultural history is such a vast subject, humanists often aim to study certain cultures at certain times and to investigate representative cultural production that seems to best capture the human spirit—those “true and beautiful” works that best make sense of who we are, where we have come from and where we are going.
In this course, we will focus principally on Western humanistic traditions from approximately 900 B.C. to the present day. We will be looking at how Western cultural traditions answer the perennial questions (“Who are we?” and “Where did we come from?” and “Where are we going?”) in ways that seem to strike us as true, wise or beautiful. In order to find different answers to these existential questions, we will study the plastic arts, music, architecture, cinema, philosophy, religion, poetry, drama and literature from both a historical and a thematic perspective. There will be a focus on how the Judeo-Christian tradition has served as the baseline for culture and values in the Western World.
A course virtual text package that will serve students as a general interdisciplinary “review” of the Western religious tradition of monotheism with a focus on Jewish and Christian religious traditions with a unit on Islam as a “clash of monotheistic ideals” relevant to the contemporary world.
In the course we will be focusing in-depth on the origins and development of the three Western monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We will focus on the sacred texts of these three religious traditions—the Torah, Nevi’im and Ketuvim and the New Testament in The Holy Bible, and the Qur’an—as well as their rituals and celebrations and the music, art, cinema, philosophy, poetry, drama, literature and architecture inspired by monotheistic religious belief and practice. That is to say, we will be looking at how these monotheistic cultural traditions answer the questions: ―Who are we? ―Where did we come from? and ―Where are we going? We will also briefly look at the physical geography, history and politics of the peoples and lands most influenced by Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Emphasis on comparative readings of sacred texts.
The Western Tradition: The Importance of Dialogue serves as a “welcome module” to place in every course as orientation for a series of collegiate humanities courses, and as a contribution to Open Educational Resources. The Western Tradition also includes a general understanding of Socratic discussion and the tradition of dialogue in the West, activities on how to write factual, interpretive and evaluative questions, religious and philosophic reasons why this approach is the most sound and the most fruitful and several units specific to the course in which we “practice” reading and discussion of seminal texts that are relevant for the course of study.
Quadratic Learning with Socratic Dialogue