The official guide to self-study RA courses from ASU, BYU, UIdaho, etc.

[rachel83az]

Provider: ASU EA
Course: HST 102 - Western Civilization: Ancient and Medieval Europe
Course content: Mostly videos, some downloadable content. Cerego flash cards. Some PDFs that you're expected to download & read but the videos have sufficient content for all but a couple of questions.
Final exam format: Multiple choice. I think there were about 50 questions.
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: Draws from the same pool of questions as the weekly quizzes so things should be pretty familiar.
Time taken on course: 8 weeks including finals.
Familiarity with subject before course: Some basic familiarity with history but nothing official.
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: This course does not expect you to memorize dates! You're expected to know roughly what happened first/second/third in a sequence of events but you're not expected to remember whether a certain thing happened on the 8th of March or the 3rd of August and in what year. The videos were also pretty interesting and engaging despite history often being a dry subject in school.
1-10 Difficulty level: 2 or 3
Final grade: A. I didn't expect to get this high of a grade but this was, so far, the easiest and possibly the most interesting ASU course that I've taken. It makes me wish that I could take more history classes from the same instructors.

Any papers or other assignments, Rachel?

Oh, I completely forgot about the design project. It's only worth 5% of your grade and I completely skipped doing it. It can be pretty much anything, from a poem to a drawing of something you learned, to a brief paper. If you need those extra points it's worth it. Otherwise, don't. But there are no weekly papers or anything like that, just the quizzes and Cerego flashcards.