Spotlight on Courses

Spotlight on Winter 2025 Honors Course Offerings

As you plan or adjust your schedule, take a look at the interesting courses below (some of them being offered in the Honors College for the first time!). See the Schedule of Classes for more details and the list of honors courses currently planned for the entire year. And don’t forget the HC 409 options for cultural ambassadorship and civic engagement!

Corvallis Campus 

Find the day/time and CRN details for these courses in the OSU Schedule for Winter 2025.

 

BOT 101H Botany: A Human Concern

Instructor(s): Stephen Meyers

Introductory botany for non-majors, emphasizing the role of plants in the environment, agriculture and society. Includes molecular approaches to the study of plant function and genetic engineering.

 

CS 331H Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Instructor(s): Prasad Tadepalli

How is Artificial Intelligence (AI) different from ordinary software? How does Google Maps find a route?

How do chess programs work? What is the difference between AI and AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)?

What is knowledge and what is reasoning? How should one make decisions under uncertainty?

Are we close to Superintelligent AI?

Through interactive discussions and programming exercises, this course introduces you to the foundational concepts of AI, namely search, knowledge representation, and reasoning.

 

PS 110H Governing After the Zombie Apocalypse

Instructor(s): Rorie Solberg

It is 2065 and the survivors of a global pandemic have decided to organize a government. You have been selected to represent your region at the upcoming constitutional convention as a constitutional delegate. To do so, you need to organize your travel to the city of New Corvallis and arrive by the first week of January.  During the 2.5 months set aside for the convention, delegates will learn about the basic building blocks of government and how governmental institutions and structures create, reflect and reinforce systems of power, privilege and difference. Then, working first with your regional delegation, you will draft a new constitution and bill of rights and present your constitution to the entire convention. Then, we will come together in a full constitutional convention to deliberate and compromise on a new founding document and a new government.

 

PSY 202HZ Introduction to Psychology II

Instructor(s): Juan Hu

Scientific study of behavior and experience. Motivation and emotion; personality; social psychology, human development, psychopathology and psychotherapy.

 

PSY 340H Cognitive Psychology

Instructor(s): Kristen Macuga

We will explore theories and findings from cognitive psychology—the study of the mind—and consider what they tell us about real-world tasks such as driving, studying, making financial decisions, or giving eyewitness testimony. Along the way, we will recreate some classical experiments on attention, memory, and decision making, and read some cutting- edge research on the role of our mental processes in our everyday performance.

 

SOC 205H Institutions and Social Change

Instructor(s): Rebecca Bemrose

Sociological study of the dynamic organizational nature of society through analysis of social change and major social institutions such as family, education, religion, the economy, and political systems. 

 

HC 407 Creative Ritual: Crafting Ways to Work

Instructor(s): Clare Braun

So you're making a thing. You sit down to work. Now what, exactly, is supposed to happen? How do you make inspiration strike? When it does, how do you turn the idea into the thing?

We'll experiment with components and conditions of active creative work (boredom, writing implements, journaling, fresh air, ambient noise, mindfulness, maybe a little light spellcasting, etc.,) to better understand and shape our habits of production. Whether or not you're working on a large project, you'll craft intentional creative practices, forming rituals to remove friction and make creative work more satisfying.

 

HC 407 Eco-Comedy: Laughter and Satire in an Age of Environmental Catastrophe

Instructor(s): Evan Gottlieb

Our current environmental predicament would seem to be no laughing matter. Yet comedy in general and satire in particular have long worked not only to entertain and even shock us, but also to make us think critically and self-reflectively about the complexities, contradictions, and hypocrisies of our human and social realities. To consider the uses (and abuses?) of eco-comedy, we'll analyze and discuss recent examples in a variety of media, including editorial cartoons, animated TV shows (especially South Park), stand-up comedy routines, movies (especially Don't Look Up [2021]), and novels (including Ned Beauman's award-winning, wonderfully titled near-future eco-satire, Venomous Lumpsucker).

 

HC 407 Enigmatic fossils: Are Ediacaran fossils earth's oldest animals or a failed experiment in evolution?

Instructor(s): Jessica Creveling

What can we learn about an animal from outward appearance alone? Paleontologists wrestle with this question when peering at fossils, the preserved remains of once-living organisms. No fossils have puzzled, vexed, or inspired paleontologists more than the enigmatic Ediacaran Biota, a collection of morphologically diverse, soft-bodied organisms that appear globally in rocks from 575 - 541 million years ago, well before the Cambrian "explosion" of animal life. We'll scrutinize replicas of Ediacaran fossils to debate whether these organisms are related to modern phyla (or instead "failed experiments" in animal evolution) and to speculate on how they lived.

 

HC 407 Ginnovation - From greens to glass

Instructor(s): Paul Hughes

Gin is an increasingly popular distilled spirit, not least because of flexibility around the ingredients used. Here we will introduce the category before heading to the distilled spirits laboratory. There you will select your ingredients and produce your distilled gin. For those students willing to taste, there will be a taste-off to decide on the best in class!

 

HC 407 Gonzo TikToks: Redefining Gonzo Journalism for the 21st Century

Instructor(s): Rich Collins

When describing Gonzo Journalism, Hunter S. Thompson said that "the eye & mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera," taking in the action, recording it, and reporting out with little editing. That's fine for 1979 when he wrote it, but how about now that we all walk around with actual cameras in our pockets? How do we define Gonzo Journalism now? How do platforms such as TikTok and Instagram change that definition? In this class, we'll seek answers to these questions and experiment with creating gonzo TikToks of our own.

 

HC 407 Greek Mythology and its artistic representation

Instructor(s): Danielle Di Lodovico

This course explores the intersection of ancient Greek and Roman mythology and examines how myths were represented in art through the centuries and reimagined in contemporary visual culture. This course aims not only to dissect the roots of mythological stories and understand the complex symbolism, but also to trace their evolution and adaptation in modern mediums, providing students with a nuanced understanding of cultural continuity and transformation and the awareness of the complex dialogue between past and present.

 

HC 407 Medicine and Mindfulness

Instructor(s): Courtney Campbell & Katelin Gallagher

This colloquium offers students with a career path and/or scholarly interest in medicine (and related health professions) a forum by which to explore the concept of mindfulness and its emerging integration within medical education and practice.  It will also provide forms of experiential learning of mindfulness practices adapted for and utilized by medical practitioners.  The class will partner with the OSU Marigold Center for a mindfulness workshop.  

 

HC 407 Can We Protect Oregon's Endangered Species on Private Land? 

Instructor(s): Joe Kerkvliet

All 108 Oregon animals and plants at-risk of extinction rely on private land for food, shelter, breeding, or migration. Private landowners must forego profits to protect at-risk species. We explore how public and non-profit organizations use legal tools, including conservation easements and Safe Harbor Agreements, to incentivize landowners to protect at-risk species. Speakers from Greenbelt Land Trust, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, and others tell us how they apply these tools.  We then visit nearby private lands managed to conserve species.  Discussions, readings, and one field trip explore the plusses and minuses of using private landowners to protect at-risk species. 

 

HC 407 Sport Psychology: A Critical Analysis of Ted Lasso

Instructor(s): William Massey

This course will examine concepts in sport and performance psychology using the Apple TV hit series Ted Lasso. Students will analyze and debate what works and why when it comes to the mental side of sport performance, as well as translate what they learn into actionable strategies. 

 

Ecampus

Find the day/time and CRN details for these courses in the OSU Schedule for Winter 2025.

 

CS 162H Introduction to Computer Science II

Instructor(s): Tim Alcon

The honors section of this class features group discussions of issues relevant to computer science.

This class provides an overview of the fundamental concepts of computer science. Studies basic data structures, computer programming techniques and application of software engineering principles. Introduces analysis of programs.

 

PSY 202HZ

Instructor(s): Juan Hu

Scientific study of behavior and experience. Motivation and emotion; personality; social psychology, human development, psychopathology and psychotherapy.

 

SUS 331H Sustainability, Justice, and Engagement

Instructor(s): Deanna Lloyd

Many sustainability crises are local, and the people most impacted tend to be groups already experiencing difference, lack of power, and discrimination. Transformational responses led by those most affected will be examined -- responses that address the environmental problem while also building social and economic power for those affected. The tools and tactics used to achieve positive changes will be analyzed. 

 

HC 407 Cults and Newer Religions

Instructor(s): Eliza Barstow

Offers students an opportunity to think about what constitutes "religion." Invites students to understand and debate terminology such as "cult," "syncretism," and "spiritual but not religious." Considers the reality that religion has sometimes sought to reclaim an older social order and other times sought to radically reinvent the social order and create new utopias. 

 

HC 407 Vampires, Race, and Gender

Instructor(s): Jonathan Kaplan

Vampires are more than characters in scary stories. Together, we will explore the ways in which vampires tell us who we are, and who and what we fear. In this course, we will explore the reasons for modern society's fascination with the vampire myth, and some of the uses that authors have made of the vampire figure in fiction.  We will focus especially on the ways in which vampire stories interact with issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, using methodologies from cultural history, gender studies, philosophy, anthropology, and film studies.

 

HC 407 (How) Is a Better World Possible? Politics Between Utopia & Dystopia

Instructor(s): Philipp Kneis

We are all aware that we are living in a world of imperfection, and we frequently wonder whether a better world would indeed be possible. In fact, one of the oldest problems for political and social theory is how to create an ideal state. Yet this quest for utopia has always come at the price of dystopia. An ideal state for whom? Every utopia, it seems, is someone else's dystopia. Even the most well-meaning ideas for creating a better society will have unintended consequences.

OSU-Cascades Campus

Find the day/time and CRN details for these courses in the OSU Schedule for Winter 2025.

 

HC 407 Communicating Science

Instructor(s): Neil Browne & Irene Moore

The goal of this class is for students in any discipline to explore avenues of communicating science through writing.  Our culture is firmly invested in science, and yet individuals often lack the tools to engage meaningfully in discussions and disputes in which science plays a central role. It follows that scientists be able to communicate effectively with the general population.  In order to enrich scientific discourse among scientists and the larger population, we explore the relations among writing, art, and science.