INST 154: Home Page

INST 154
Apollo at 50
Fall 2020

Catalog Description

In May 1961, President Kennedy reached into the 21st century and pulled a decade back into the 1960s. Just over eight years later, Neil Armstrong became the first of twelve people to walk on the Moon. This was one of the greatest engineering accomplishments of all time, and a transcendent human experience. This course will draw on both primary and secondary sources to explore the social, political, financial, scientific, engineering, operational and human aspects of the Apollo program that came together to make the Moon landings possible and it will invite students to reflect on the limitations of the Apollo approach that leave us still grasping for solutions to many other complex societal problems.

Goals

Understand the interplay between political, economic, social, scientific, technical, and practical factors that made the Apollo program both possible and challenging.
Develop an appreciation for the degree of complexity involved in an undertaking of this scale, the processes that were used to manage that complexity, and how well those processes worked.
Apply what you have learned to help you think about what's similar and what's different in the approaches that could be taken to address other exceptionally challenging problems.

Approach

Synchronous Online Sessions

The class will meet online using Zoom on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5:00 to 6:15 PM for the first two weeks of the semester, and then will continue to meet synchronously online, but only on Tuesdays, from 5:00 to 6:15 PM for the remainder of the semester. Each synchronous online session will begin with a live presentation by the instructor (or occasionally by a guest speaker), followed by discussion between students in small groups, and then by a mix of additional presentation and interactive full-class discussion led by the instructor.

The small group discussions will occur in groups of 5-10 to give students an opportunity to engage with each other and with members of the instructional staff to discuss specific aspects of the topic for that session, drawing on material they have read or viewed in preparation for that session and on the instructor's initial presentation.

In the final synchronous session of the semester, students will meet with each other, and with members of the instructional staff, to discuss drafts of their term papers that they exchanged the previous week.

Asynchronous Online Sessions

From the third week of the semester, the second session each week will be asynchronous, with all activities for those sessions to be completed by 7 PM on Saturday evening. Each asynchronous session will typically involve five student activities:

Viewing an introductory video (typically about 5 minutes)
Completing one reading assignment (typically 1 hour)
An open book quiz on the assigned reading
Viewing one or more lecture videos (typically about 50 minutes)
Contributing to written discussion of one or more questions on a discussion board

The course is designed so that students can complete all course activities (preparation for each session, participation in synchronous and asynchronous sessions, and assigned projects and papers) in 8 hours per week; students should plan their schedules to have that much time available.

Complete details on the course will be available on ELMS by August 17. In the mean time, interested students are invited to review the complete materials from the Spring 2020 offering of the course, which are available at http://users.umiacs.umd.edu/~oard/teaching/154/spring20/. Synchronous sessions will be patterned after the lectures that were recorded that are available as lecture videos for sessions 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, and 21, which can be found on the schedule page. Asynchronous sessions will be broadly similar to the full content from sessions 17 and 22.

Questions can be sent to the instructor, Doug Oard, at oard@umd.edu.

Doug Oard