LAYOUT:
This website is best viewed full-screen on a laptop. But it also has mobile usability. Its basic layout can be seen at a quick glance by browsing the menu ribbon on the top left of the screen on a  laptop and top right on a mobile interface. Each item on the ribbon has a drop down menu, with links to nested pages. Click on any item to navigate to its landing page and hover the cursor on it to see the drop-down menu. 

content presentation:
Each week in the course has a page dedicated to it. These entries, each dealing with a different topic, are structured in the same manner, under three headings: (1) Context; (2) Preparing for the Week; and (3) Key Concepts. 

The attention paid to concepts and conceptual learning is what makes this a college course, different from school. Each week's theme has a set of concepts attached to it. You are strongly encouraged to familiarize yourself with these concepts and use them in analyzing and understanding the course material and in class discussions. Concepts are like toys for the mind. Once you get the hang of it, they are great fun to play around with. The entries under Key Concepts break down the relevant ones in the course for you. 

Preparing for the Week, as the name suggests, gives you an overview of the reading and viewing materials assigned in the course. Skimming this overview will give you, a in two-line byte, a sense of what they are about before you actually get down to reading/watching them.

The Context, similarly, put the theme of the week into conversation with learning points from the previous weeks and the course overall.  It provides additional information and ideas that help situate the theme better and clarify to you the rationale of theme in the unit and the course.

hyperlinks:
Any text that is underlined on the website is a hyperlink. Click on these links to widen the scope of your engagement with a topic and go down fascinating rabbit holes.

how to use wikipedia:
You will find that many of the hyperlinks will take you to Wikipedia entries. Does that mean Wikipedia is a reliable source of information and okay to cite in assignments? The answer to the latter part of the question is NO! But before you think this is hypocritical, consider the explanation: We recognize that there is no way to avoid Wikipedia as the first stop of information in the digital space today. And there is no information that Wikipedia does not have. Hence, from the kid in kindergarten to the high-flying professor--everybody goes to Wikipedia. But the thing with Wikipedia is that the quality of entries can be uneven. A lot of them are of excellent quality. But there is a lot that are of suspicious content. One, therefore, has to be cautious with information gleaned from Wikipedia. If an entry in it has not been vetted by a large number of people, then it is quite likely that it might contain unverified information. One, therefore, always needs to check the sources based on which a particular Wikipedia entry has been crafted. Therefore, rather than quoting directly from or citing a Wikipedia entry, we encourage you to go the the sources and cite them instead.

typographic conventions:
If a word is italicized , i.e., written in a slanted way, it is to highlight is significance in that context. If a word or a phrase is single quotes, it is an indication that either the meaning of the word/phrase is not fully settled and/or that we should look beyond its obvious meaning in the given context. Thus, when India is written as 'India' it is to signal that it means something more or different that the country we know by that name, of which we are citizens. Similarly, if the word 'nation' is within quotes, it is an indication that attention is being drawn the the multiple meanings of the word, not just its common-sensical usage to mean a country.