This course includes many interactive opportunities where students can strengthen their knowledge and practice using the concepts taught in the course. Research has shown that this type of learn-by-doing approach has a significant positive impact on learning. Interactive opportunities come in multiple forms:

Practice Questions

Practice questions appear on most pages in the course, embedded in the main text of the page. The purpose of these questions is different than questions on self-checks or quizzes, which are designed to see if the student has mastered the concept. Instead, practice questions allow students to learn by interacting with the concepts they are learning about. For example, a practice question might present a student with a scenario and ask them to apply the concept that they have just read about.

These practice questions do not count for a grade, and getting the answer “wrong” can be just as valuable to the learning process as answering correctly, as practice questions often address common student misconceptions and give students immediate feedback intended to correct those misconceptions.

Activities

In addition to practice questions, the course contains select opportunities for additional learning by doing in the form of more extensive interactive activities. These often occur at places in the course where instructors report that students tend to struggle, or where data shows that students need extra support.

• Module 1: Westward Expansion (1840-1900)
  • This module contains several simple matching activities:
    • Westward Migration, Indian relations, Native American leaders, and major players in the American West
• Module 2: Industrialization and Urbanization (1870-1900)
  • Inventions of the Gilded Age
  • The explosive growth of U.S. cities
  • Immigration in the late twentieth-century interactive
  • Giants of wealth matching activity
  • Labor Unions interactive
• Module 3: The Gilded Age (1870-1900)
• Module 4: Age of Empire—American Foreign Policy (1890-1914)
  • Analyzing political cartoons about President Roosevelt
• Module 5: The Progressive Era (1890-1920)
  • The election of 1912
  • Goals of sensationalist reporting
• Module 6: America in World War I (1914-1919)
  • Ranking Wilson’s post-war motivations
• Module 7: The Jazz Age (1919-1929)
  • Examining research questions
• Module 8: The Great Depression (1929-1932)
  • Understanding the stock market review and causes of the Great Depression matching activity
• Module 9: The New Deal (1932-1941)
  • The New Deal today
• Module 10: World War II (1941-1945)
  • The outbreak of war in the Pacific
• Module 11: Post-War Prosperity and the Cold War (1945-1960)
  • The Berlin Airlift game
• Module 12: America in the 1960s (1960-1970)
• Module 13: Political Storms at Home and Abroad (1968-1980)
• Module 14: From Cold War to Culture Wars (1980-2000)
  • Political terminology review
• Module 15: The Twenty-First Century (2000-2020)
  • Immigration Review