Introduction to Tibetan Buddhist Culture Course

Introduction to Tibetan Buddhist Culture is a low-level undergraduate course taught at the University of Virginia by David Germano. In the fall semester of 2001 we directly incorporated the Digital Library into all student assignments. These inquiries resulted in Web pages that used hyperlinked texts and images. In addition, for their final assignments students digitally produced three-dimensional exhibition halls, in which they posted their Web essays. Continued use of this methodology is planned for future versions of the course.

This work is supported by Virginia's Instructional Technology Group, and makes use of their collaborative classroom management and authoring system called E-folio, which students use on-line to make sophisticated Web essays and comment on each other's work.

Currently, we have posted the following components of the course (please note you can also use the menu bar tab for "Courses: Tibetan Buddhist Culture" to navigate through these components at any point)

The Syllabus provides a detailed set of guidelines for the course, while the Calendar provides the week by week chronology of readings and activities.

The Exhibition Hall provides a link to the three dimensional Web-based Exhibition Hall in which student work has been posted as Web sites accessible through images hanging on the walls of their virtual gallery rooms.

Student Movies provides access to movies fashioned by students in which images, textual captions and mostly Tibetan folk music were combined to fashion automatically playing "movies" with the images unfolding with music in the background.

The E-folio Collaborative Digital Classroom Management System is the software system designed at UVA which is used by the class to faciliate the posting of student work over the Web, and general communication within the class over the Web. The site provides a detailed handbook of how to use E-folio.