Overview
About the Library
The Library includes 14 open-source courses, at the graduate and undergraduate levels. These are free for adoption and modification. Course materials are downloadable and editable.
They include syllabi, lecture slides, assessments, and activities in disciplines such as Anthropology, Economics, and Psychology, and more specifically topics such as social complexity, music, racism, environmental behavior, kinship, and animal culture.
Materials were created by leading cultural evolution scholars in the UK, US, Germany, Italy, Argentina in universities such as Stanford, Durham, St. Andrews, U.C. Davis.
History
ACE Curricular Awards Project
The library emerged from the ACE Curricular Awards project. The project aimed to enhance the teaching of cultural evolution worldwide by facilitating the transmission and modification of high quality cultural evolution teaching materials. It contained two award competitions, the Course Design Awards, (for courses on cultural evolution from established academics), and the Teaching Innovation Awards, (for those looking to integrate new cultural evolution materials into their courses, especially early career researchers and those in the global south). The Teaching Materials Library was curated from the Course Design competition.
We received 22 applications from expert educators in 8 countries across 7 disciplines. Course topics ranged from those entirely devoted to cultural evolution, to special topics in cultural evolution (e.g. animal culture, the evolution of music, kinship, or complex societies) to disciplinary courses incorporating cultural evolution. Courses were reviewed by a volunteer expert panel according to an established rubric covering lecture materials, in-class activities, assessments, and readings and resources.
The library includes all award-winning and honorable mention courses from the Course Design Award competition and other donated special collections.
Logistics
Library Access & Usage
The library is stored in an open-access Google Drive (linked above)
The database includes information about the authors, institution, course level, hrs of CE content, reviewer comments, and the materials in the following formats: PPTX, KEY, PDF, XLSX, CSV, DOCX
To use the course materials, you must cite the original authors. Citation information is included for each course. For example:
Luke Rendell, Mike Webster, Ellen Garland, & Cat Hobaiter, The Question of Culture in Animals, Sea Mammal Research Unit, Centre for Biological Diversity, & Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Biology and School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of St. Andrews
Websites by Alberon.
© 2026 Cultural Evolution Society