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| Illustration from Canterbury Tales |
About the Professor
Ellis L. "Skip" Knox has been teaching history courses online since 1994. He received an M.A. in medieval history from the University of Utah, studying under Dr. Glenn Olsen, and received his Ph.D. in early modern social and economic history from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1984, studying under Dr. Miriam Chrisman. He has been adjunct professor of history at Boise State University since 1986 and has taught a variety of courses in that capacity. Teaching has been Skip's "other" job since 1984. His "day" job has been in computers: since 1984 as the university's first full-time PC support tech, then becoming the university's first webmaster in 1995 (the actual title wasn't created until 1998).
From the start, Skip was interested in finding ways to merge history and computers. He used computers in the classroom to supplement lecture with IBM Storyboard (Skip has always disliked Powerpoint). He taught in an interactive video classroom. He even taught a course on the Renaissance via modem over an RBBS bulletin board system. When the World Wide Web came along, though, he knew at once that this was the technology he wanted to use.
He just missed being the first history course on the Internet. That honor goes to James O'Donnell at Penn State, who taught a seminar on St. Augustine in the fall of 1993, using listserv for discussion and a web site for providing source readings. Skip offered his Renaissance course in spring 1994, and followed that with the first history survey course on the Net (History of Western Civilization), in the fall of 1994. He has been teaching online ever since.