Introducing an Interdisciplinary Course Into General Higher Education

Abstract

This chapter describes a new interdisciplinary course introduced at Indiana University South Bend. The course is designed for students of any majors to meet their general education requirement on ‘the natural world' subject. The course topics are divided into three parts. First, using ‘information' as the main thread, this course connects physical information, chemical information, biological information, and social information. Second, using basic computing model and information entropy, this course generalizes information and information theory. Third, information is correlated to cutting-edge computing topics such as quantum computing, complexity, and uncertainty. The main objective of this course is to provide an outline of information theory to students using an interdisciplinary approach.