Besides offering core courses, AUA provides General Education courses from various fields. It has a variety of unique courses like Soviet Armenia, Water, the Human Brain, and others. This semester Special Topics in Social Sciences: Trust was offered.
As presented in the course syllabus, Trust was tailored to explore the role of trust in projects, organizations, and personal relationships as affected by psychological, social, legal, human, technical, and other factors.
The course is taught by BAB faculty member Theofanis Varvoglis who has a Ph.D. in Marketing and specializes in Marketing Strategy and Entrepreneurial Decision Making. Professor Varvoglis is proud to admit that the course is structured to explore trust as a societal function.
Having the luxury and the freedom to structure the course content on his own, the instructor refers to this opportunity as “a curse and a blessing at the same time.” He mentions that trust has been an object of interest for him for many years. Besides reading many books and articles and taking part in discussions, his preparation for teaching the course came from years of paying attention to the ways trust manifests itself in different spheres of life.
EC Sophomore Ani Vrshikyan, who is taking the course Trust this semester, reveals that her motivation behind taking the course was to understand how trust-building manifests itself in interpersonal relationships and other spheres of life. Ani finds Trust to be different from the rest of her classes in its provided skillset. “In other courses, we learn skills that will be practiced in our future jobs, but this class specifically helps us to deal with issues that we might face throughout our whole life,” explains Ani.
Some of the other courses that professor Varvoglis teaches are Marketing Management, Consumer Behavior, and Market Research. When comparing those field-specific courses with Trust, he sees some notable differences in the skeletons of the classes besides their content. “When I am teaching Marketing or any other course, the objective is to provide students with an understanding of some theory and skills to apply,” adds Professor Varvoglis.
To Professor Varvoglis having fresh ingredients in teaching means having content with an emotional foundation. The course-takers will end the academic year by holding a 3-day conference to present their research findings on the role of trust in different spheres of life, ranging from interpersonal relationships to artificial intelligence.
