This session may fall outside the usual range of digital-humanities topics for a THATCamp, but so be it.

I’d like to convene a session on teaching history in fully-online formats– that is, when you may never meet your students in the flesh. At the urban public US university where I teach, there’s increasing pressure to bring more of our courses online, up to and including a fully-online BA in history. We’re encouraged to follow the Quality Matters standards for peer-reviewed best practices in fully-online course design. I was originally suspicious of Quality Matters, not least because of its Orwellian naming, but it’s been very useful for learning how to teach online.

So, how do you teach history online? 3 semesters ago, I walked into a job with a substantial online-teaching component and no prior experience. Frankly, I’ve been making it up as I go along, with the help of a staff instructional designer and my university’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching. Although my initial efforts were very rough, things have improved, and I’m now cautiously optimistic about online courses compared to face-to-face courses. I’d like to share some of what’s been working for me and hear from others about your experiences.

Some topics we might discuss include:

* How to use discussion forums, with or without instructor participation
* Assignments that work for teaching critical-thinking skills in history
* The challenges of self-directed learning; motivating students by teaching curiosity
* Journals and reflective assignments
* Designing assignments that are manageable to grade with a large student load (90+ students per instructor per semester)
* synchronous meetings (chat, Adobe Connect, Skype, etc) and when they’re most effective
* team-based learning (I’m not doing it, but I hear it can work very well online)
* peer-review assignments as a learning tool (via Turnitin.com or similar)
* mini-lectures and when they’re useful
* teaching strategies from MOOCs that we can adapt for smaller courses

So, who’s interested? Comment here with a little more information about how this session relates to you. If we do this, it’ll need to be in the morning, because I need to depart by 1pm for my flight home.

I’m a reference and systems librarian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and as such I work with historians at all stages of their career who are utilizing the primary and secondary sources in the Museum’s Library and Archives. I’ve also been helping Rebecca Erbelding, an archivist at the Museum and an ABD in history at George Mason University, in constructing her personal digital archive of more than 30,000 documents (not images; PDF documents, ranging from a single-page memo to a 100+ page report, almost all created from photographs of primary sources from various archives), all while retaining relevant metadata. About a year ago, I took what Rebecca and I had learned about how to build a useful personal archive and did a well-received workshop at the Museum for visiting Fellows. We realized today, during a talk about personal archives and big data sets, that some AHA participants might be interested in this workshop. Rebecca and I are proposing to lead a how-to session to provide a framework for the step-by-step process of constructing a personal digital archive of all the photos and scanned documents you have created as part of your research, incorporating them into software that allows you to analyze the documents and, if you want, export your work into fielded data sets (all with no or minimal programming or coding skills). You can adapt or reject any aspect of the framework to make it work for you, but if you truly have no idea how to get from zero to personal archive, we might be able to help. This could certainly build upon (or lead into) Jordan’s proposal for a discussion about “Notecards for the New Century.“