LIMA — As part of Ohio State University’s 150th anniversary, a free non-credit open course on the history of the institution is being offered.
“I think they can really relate themselves to the university as a whole,” said Tyler Osborne, the sesquicentennial archives assistant from University Archives. “They can really connect with this university and its 150-year history and really connect with it and learn things they didn’t know before that really teaches them something as well as us re-associating them with the university. They learned that their college was founded in a certain year and so that reconnects them with that information and kind of makes them prouder to be a Buckeye, to be a college of engineering grad or something like that. I think it just reaffirms the pride that Buckeyes have.”
Osborne was at the Lima campus on Tuesday to talk about what’s offered in the university’s online archive and some of the history of Ohio State.
She discussed the early days of Ohio State University with the Lifelong Learning Institute at OSU Lima and presented archival hand-written documents that appear online as part of the curriculum.
Ohio State was founded in 1870 thanks to a transformational piece of legislation granting federal land to states for the purpose of providing a higher education to working-class citizens.
“It was very humble beginnings and it wasn’t a given that we were going to be here. We were quite lucky that we have grown to such a large university, and who would have known that that would have happened when seeing the beginnings that we had,” said Osborne.
The nine-module, non-credit on-line course is taught by David Staley, the director of the Humanities Institute, director of the Center for Humanities in Practice and associate professor of history; and Tamar Chute, professor, university archivist and head of archives in the University Libraries.
“What I was most interested in was how the archival personnel in Columbus put this whole 150-year biography together, the process by which they selected some topics and not others,” said David Adams, associate professor of sociology emeritus at the Lima campus.
If you want to check out the course, go to go.osu.edu/buckeyebiography.
The free course is available through Dec. 19, 2020.
.neFileBlock {
margin-bottom: 20px;
}
.neFileBlock p {
margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
}
.neFileBlock .neFile {
border-bottom: 1px dotted #aaa;
padding-bottom: 5px;
padding-top: 10px;
}
.neFileBlock .neCaption {
font-size: 85%;
}
