Course Spotlight

General

With hundreds of courses offered every Summer, the options can be overwhelming! We’re shining a spotlight on a selection of courses designed to diversify your experience and broaden your horizons. 

The courses highlighted below are newly developed, offer unique elements or learning outcomes, highlight a trending topic, or open up to non-majors during the Summer Quarter. We’ll keep adding to this list to connect you with hard-to-find courses that make a lasting impact. 

Explore General Courses

Course Spotlight General

This 8-unit immersive course supports students in a unique exploration of Shakespearean works on page and stage. Scholarships are available to offset the unit fees associated with the course.

This course will examine the utopian dream through history, literature, philosophy, and public memory. Starting with a historical and philosophical background of the concepts and unintended consequences of idealism, the course will then turn to focus more narrowly on our own planned community of Isla Vista. Scholarships are available to offset the unit fees associated with the course, and it fulfills GE requirements for Area E and Writing. 

This course is taught in person and in virtual reality, with the help of Meta Quest 3 VR headsets. Students will learn about the strange and everyday ways that religion and technology fit together. Religious groups that reject technology, like the Amish, are rare. Evangelical Christians are often among the first to adopt new technologies that can help them preach the gospel. Lesser known religious groups, like Spiritualism, have always integrated technology, and Transhumanist religions try to use technology to transcend mortality and the human form. This class introduces students to these religious movements, and it also considers big questions, such as whether technology has made the end of the world possible or might one day save us all.

girl surfing