Professor Jacobsen sees the purpose of teaching, and the role of those who teach, as empowering students to lead lives of purpose and impact as engaged citizens of the world and participants in civil democratic life. He views his particular role as helping students learn to create, access, understand, and use new knowledge in dynamic information and data-intensive environments.
He describes his goal this way:
"I want to teach students how to learn, how to think critically, and how to evaluate evidence and critique and make arguments. I do not view my role as teaching students what to think, much less that they should believe as I do. Subject matter instruction is of declining value relative to capacity development."
Professor Jacobsen's courses cover a wide range of topics designed to confer adaptable and enduring abilities in critical thinking, argumentation and advocacy, informational awareness, and scholarly knowledge production and use.
His courses have included: debating public policy, public speaking, legal advocacy, network analysis, digital scholarship, and a personal favorite, "Play Ball," a course on the social history of America told through baseball.
Ever curious, he regularly develops and proposes new courses, and his academic curiosity is lately more focused on something else close to his heart: organized sports. He's genuinely into the numbers side of athletic performance and just as interested in the bigger picture - the business of sports and how organized athletics have shaped American culture and history. It probably helps that he's been an Oregon sports diehard for decades, witnessing the legendary Prefontaine at Hayward Field as a young kid and attending the infamous 1983 Oregon–Oregon State "Toilet Bowl," a 0–0 tie so ugly it's become legend.
Selective course offerings
HC231 Debating Public Policy
HC231 Public Speaking
HC301 Network Analysis
HC431 Digital Scholarship
HC431 Play ball! A social history of America
HC477 Thesis prospectus
