About Us

Hello! This website grew out of a series of our collaborative projects based at the University of Texas at Austin. In the Fall of 2014, two of its authors—Pat and Rob—began teaching a large, synchronous, online course to undergraduates. Broadcast from a television studio on campus, it was an immensely chaotic, challenging, and rewarding experience. The course forced us to rethink much of what we did in classroom. We learned valuable lessons about effective communication, the importance of coherent organization, and just how engaged students were in the larger world around them. Our students also wanted some guidance in sifting through a polarizing and frustrating information environment found across a wide range of media outlets.

We thought we could help. So we designed a course structure to create a dialogue between academic concepts and contemporary policy debates. And then we sought to discipline this conversation with the analytical tools found in university classrooms.

This teaching orientation prompted us to consider writing a textbook. And this led Rob and Pat to bring Terry in on this broader project. The three of us sought to incorporate these lessons about the changing university classroom and the changing public square in the United States into Opening the Global System.

The textbook went through extensive rounds of revision. We tested its primary components—including the written narratives, the interactives, and the videos--in our courses at UT-Austin. We conducted extensive student surveys; and we relied on a student focus group that went through the entire manuscript and effectively told us what they were thinking while they read.

We hope that this website and our textbook can be a helpful resource for those trying to understand the dynamic world, one marked by increasingly permeable boundaries, in which we all now find ourselves.