Course Details

After successfully completing this course, you will be able to:

1. Explain the political and diplomatic developments in Europe during the period from 1900 to 1920.
2. Analyze the military campaigns of the Great War on all fronts.
3. Evaluate the various new weapons technologies used in the war, and their impact on it.
4. Critique the performance of military leaders in participant armies.
5. Assess the role of the war in creating political instability and revolution.
6. Evaluate the factors that led to victory for one side and defeat for the other.
7. Deconstruct some of the common myths about the war.

There will be three types of graded activities in this course – Discussion Forum postings, Reading Opinion Essays, and a Research Proposal and Paper. The breakdown of each activity, in terms of points and percentage of the overall course grade, is given in the table at the end of this section. A brief description of each of these activities follows. For more complete information on the work, see the Assignments section. The Assignments section will have due dates and point values for the assignments, as well as instructions and samples of the assignments for viewing. All of the various assignments are intended to promote and provoke critical and analytical thinking on the part of the students, not simply to regurgitate facts. Assignments may be turned in before the required due date.

The Discussion topics are the most frequent of the graded assignments. There will be a total of eight different topics, one every week, beginning the first week. Note that students are required to post to both the Virtual Introduction and the first Discussion Topic by the end of Week 1. See the Course Outline section of this syllabus, as well as the Calendar and Discussions sections of the class site for the due dates. Participation in the discussion topics will be graded on both the number and the quality of a student’s postings. Students will be expected to post both an Initial Post as a Reply to the instructor’s original subject/questions, as well as at least two Responses / Replies to other student’s posts.

The Initial Post for a given topic will be due by Thursday of that week, while the Responses will be due the Sunday of the same week. The topics will be developed in part to encourage the students to do the assigned reading, but also to provoke further investigation, research and thought about the subjects. All Forum posts are expected to be substantive, and to reference readings, both the assigned texts as well as outside reading. For further information on the discussion groups and the expectations for them, see the Instructions in the Forums section.

The Reading Opinion Essays will be based on the various books assigned as course reading. Note that while these essays will discuss the books assigned, they are NOT traditional “book reviews”. The point of the Reading Opinion Essays is to discuss your personal reaction to the book – what you felt about it, what you liked and didn’t like, and why. These essays are not intended to be an objective analysis of the book, but rather a purely personal reaction to it. The purpose of these assignments is to help students understand and identify the degree to which their own personal reaction to a book influences their analysis of it.

The Reading Opinion Essays are to be a minimum of three full pages of text, exclusive of the required title page and any end matter. Complete instructions for the Essays may be found in the Writing Assignments / Opinion Essays folder in the Resources section of the class site.

The research proposal and paper constitutes the largest single portion of the graded assigned work. The proposal will be due at the end of Week 3, and the paper will be due at the end of the course, the end of Week 8. The paper will be a minimum of 15 pages of text, exclusive of title page, notes, or bibliography, although it may be longer. The paper must be about some aspect of the Great War period. The paper subject could be a biographical study, an examination of a battle or weapon, a look at a social, economic, or political aspect of this period – almost anything that relates to the period from the early 20th century through the Russian Revolution, as long as it ties into the Great War in some fashion.

Instructions for the paper and proposal, and an example of the format for the proposal can be found in the Assignments / Research Paper section of the class site. The annotated bibliography as well as the bibliographies in the course texts can serve as a starting point for the research for these papers. The paper should follow the appropriate guidelines for form and style listed in the Policies section of this syllabus. There is also a PDF file of the US Army’s Center for Military History’s official Writing Manual – an excellent resource for working on the paper.

For students with a more interactive bent, there is an option that can be used in place of the traditional research paper. This involves purchasing and installing a computer simulation, To End All Wars, available from Matrix Games. The student will be required to write two After Action Reports (AAR) based on this simulation, one covering the tutorial and one covering a campaign of the student’s choosing. The tutorial AAR is substituted for the proposal, and the AAR on the larger campaign substitutes for the research paper. The grade for these AARs is based not on the results of the simulation, but on how well the student reports on what has happened and what they learn from the experience. Further details on these optional alternate assignments can be found in the Game folder in the Resources section of the class site. If a student wishes to choose this option, they must inform the instructor before the end of Week 2. For further questions about this option, contact the instructor.

After successfully completing this course, you will be able to:

1. Explain the political and diplomatic developments in Europe during the period from 1900 to 1920.
2. Analyze the military campaigns of the Great War on all fronts.
3. Evaluate the various new weapons technologies used in the war, and their impact on it.
4. Critique the performance of military leaders in participant armies.
5. Assess the role of the war in creating political instability and revolution.
6. Evaluate the factors that led to victory for one side and defeat for the other.
7. Deconstruct some of the common myths about the war.