I personally took his Introduction to Big History course last semester and had him as a tutor so my experiences may be useful to you!
1) While I don't know a lot about academic circles from what I gathered his method of teaching history is seen as different but not at all bad, he has connections in other fields who seem to love what he's doing.
2) Can't really answer that unfortunately.
3) David Christian is interesting as he'll readily admit if he doesn't know something in a lot of detail. That said, I found his knowledge to be quite good across all of the history we covered and he answered student questions well, pulling on others with more knowledge if he was unable to fully explain something or was unclear. He does in fact enlist the support of other professors for teaching certain topics, the lecture of the formation of the Earth was given by a Geologist and Evolution was in part covered by Dr Greg Downey, an anthropologist.
I actually really enjoyed the course as, coming from an IT background, it was quite a bit more engaging and interesting and the group discussions in tutorials were very interesting with many good discussions had.
1) While I don't know a lot about academic circles from what I gathered his method of teaching history is seen as different but not at all bad, he has connections in other fields who seem to love what he's doing.
2) Can't really answer that unfortunately.
3) David Christian is interesting as he'll readily admit if he doesn't know something in a lot of detail. That said, I found his knowledge to be quite good across all of the history we covered and he answered student questions well, pulling on others with more knowledge if he was unable to fully explain something or was unclear. He does in fact enlist the support of other professors for teaching certain topics, the lecture of the formation of the Earth was given by a Geologist and Evolution was in part covered by Dr Greg Downey, an anthropologist.
I actually really enjoyed the course as, coming from an IT background, it was quite a bit more engaging and interesting and the group discussions in tutorials were very interesting with many good discussions had.