guide for teaching Big History, edited by Richard B. Simon, Mojgan Behmand, and Thomas Burke, and written by the Dominican faculty. Barry Rodrigue, at the University of Southern Maine, established the first general education course and the first online version, which has drawn students from around the world. The University of Queensland in Australia offers an undergraduate course entitled Global History, required for all history majors, which "surveys how powerful forces and factors at work on large time-scales have shaped human history". By 2011, 50 professors around the world have offered courses. In 2012, one report suggested that Big History was being practiced as a "coherent form of research and teaching" by hundreds of academics from different disciplines. There are efforts to bring Big History to younger students. In 2008, Christian and his colleagues began developing a course for secondary school students. In 2011, a pilot high school course was taught to 3,000 kids in 50 high schools worldwide. In 2012, there were 87 schools, with 50 in the United States, teaching Big History, with the pilot program set to double in 2013 for students in the ninth and tenth grades, and even in one middle school. The subject is a STEM course at one high school. There are initiatives to make Big History a required standard course for university students throughout the world. An education project founded by philanthropist Bill Gates from his personal funds was launched in Australia and the United States, to offer a free online version of the course to high school students. International Big History Association The International Big History Association (IBHA) was founded at the Coldigioco Geological Observatory in Coldigioco, Marche, Italy, on 20 August 2010. Its headquarters is located at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, United States. Its inaugural gathering in 2012 was described as "big news" in a report in The Huffington Post. The Second IBHA Conference took place in Dominican University of California (San Rafael, CA) on August 6–10, 2014. People involved Some notable academics involved with the concept include: David Christian of Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia Eric Chaisson of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts Walter Alvarez of the University of California, Berkeley, California Craig Benjamin of Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan Cynthia Stokes Brown of Dominican University of California, San Rafael, California Andrey Korotayev of the Center for Big History and System Forecasting of the Institute of Oriental