<p>Reminds me of one of my classes where the professor polled us on possible changes to rename the course to in order to attract more students.</p>
<p>Imagine a course like Statics being named “Stop! Don’t Move!”</p>
<p>Biol 030 Human sexual Behavior aka Dirty Thirty</p>
<p>haha nice name for that course siglio21. You managed the impossible</p>
<p>ENG305 Cunning Linguistics III - Advanced Techniques</p>
<p>I mean, more power to the professors trying to boost their enrollments - enrollment often determines whether a class will continue to be offered from year to year. But it’s really a shame that they have to do this to attract students into their class!</p>
<p>My undergrad didn’t really have any classes with sexy titles. I think the sexiest one on my transcript was probably “Making of the Modern World,” which was basically world history from the 1500s until now. Needless to say we skipped a LOT.</p>
<p>I took “Advanced Piano Technology” when I was at Rice. I thought it would be neat to know how to tune a piano, but really it was a course in how the ENTIRE piano worked, and I found myself doing hammer filing and replacing strings and calibrating hammer drop distances and all sorts of other wacky things, in addition to private tuning lessons every week. It was basically “sign up to be a flunky for the chief tuner for a fine music conservatory” with two credits’ of 4.0-qualifying points to be lumped into your GPA, but I learned enough to be able to completely renovate a piano now.</p>
<p>Not all that useful with regard to my major of civil engineering, but it’s still a fun party trick. People get all kerfluffled when you take their baby grands apart and start showing people the innards.</p>
<p>This had been done since the 70’s. I was in a looong line for GE requirement class that I didn’t get into, when I was given a flyer for “Crime and the Arts” also would satisfy the GE req. I moved over to the short line and had one of the best classes with the best teacher ever. It was really History, Art History specifically, but came from ancient to modern times and eventually discussed grafitti and media. He had incredible slides, and led some of the most lively discussion seminars ever. I really became educated from that class. Dobbs or Dobson was his name.</p>
<p>Ahaha this is funny. I would definitely take a class that’s named “Knights, Castles, and Dragons”.</p>
<p>This is smart. I mean, it’s just rebranding or, metaphorically, repackaging the product. As long as it has nothing to do with changing the actual course content, that is.</p>
<p>Makes me think of a lot of classes, but the one that pops into my head at the moment is “Physics for Poets.”</p>
<p>I don’t mind branding at all. I mean, honestly, to how many non-Physics majors does Introductory Physics appeal to? That said, it’s also important that they don’t water down the course along with the name. In the case of Physics for Poets, it turned out to be a serious physics class with a little more focus on astronomy than usual, but I do worry that some professors may make the mistake of changing the syllabus to match the name.</p>
<p>re: “visions of Hogwarts and Harry Potter”
There’s a class at UVa called Defense Against the Dark Arts. It’s an advanced course on computer viruses and hacking. And I’m totally going to take it.</p>
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<p>I think another option could be to just put in pictures of what the class is like (or cartoons) because the world is relying more and more on pictures to relay information and attract information.</p>
<p>Misleading names might make people think the class is about one thing when it’s really about another.
And learning about sex is stupid when you go to college for an education about your career. Not that many people have the time for homework in classes that won’t count for credit.</p>
<p>Just saying…There was an computer game class at UC Berkeley, that had a lot of students though. So you may be on to something. But it had no real world applications. Just for fun. On the other hand here’s an idea that mixes pragmatism and entertainment.</p>
<p>Teaching sociology through world of warcraft…but this is an idea for a new class, not the same class with a different name.</p>
<p>Unless anyone has some other ideas.</p>
<p>From a student’s point of view, other than grabbing your attention, a catchy name is an indication that you’re in for an interesting class. “Medieval History” just sounds like a stuffy lecture, but courses with interesting names can sometimes be more interesting courses. Of course, this isn’t a guarantee for anything, but it helps when you’re trying to decided what classes to take next semester out of the hundreds your school offers.</p>
<p>Oh wow… " How to stage a revolution" </p>
<p>That is an amazing course title 
I thin I would have taken it up too in case I was in college!</p>
<p>It’s nice for the most part ( I took a short course at Hopkins called “3 Weeks Of Hell” about Dante’s inferno), but other times it’s not too useful, especially if they start messing with names of standard courses that say nothing about the stuff you learn – like renaming electromagnetics to ‘Fields, Matters and Waves’.</p>
<p>here at university of florida the classics department is guilty of this, also some other departments.</p>
<p>im nots sure if it qualifies as well but im taking a class in the spring named amphibious warfare for a gen. ed.</p>