In the US words like class, subject, course are used to describe a university class, while in the UK, words like subject and course are used to describe the name of the whole university degree. Instead in the UK words like module or unit are used to describe a university class.
Is there a word that will be understood by both British English speakers and American English speakers?
UPDATE: by university class I meant a series of lectures on a topic e.g. "Economics 101" or "Introduction to Statistics".
Best Answer
After a bit of research I came to a conclusion that it's hard to use a single word to explain the concept to both UK people and US people.
I found that among UK universities the word
module
is widely used to describe a series of university lectures on a topic e.g. "Economics 101" or "Introduction to Statistics". Although there are a few universities that interchangeably use bothmodule
andunit
.In the US however, I found that word
course
is used by universities to describe a series of university lectures on a topic. In contrast, UK universities use wordcourse
as well as wordsubject
to describe degree names e.g.:A 3-year course in Anthropology
orA table of subjects provided at university
.As such, I'd recommend using word
module
in the UK and wordcourse
in the US to describe a series of university lectures on a topic.