All Your Basecamp are Belong to Us: Managing Undergraduates to Create a DH Toolkit
Item
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Title
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All Your Basecamp are Belong to Us: Managing Undergraduates to Create a DH Toolkit
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Description
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A poster presented at the DHSI 2021 – Online Edition Conference & Colloquium, June 7–14, 2021
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Creator
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R.C. Miessler
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Date
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2021
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Format
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JPG
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Rights Holder
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R.C. Miessler
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Language
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English
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Abstract
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Adapting Digital Humanities instruction to meet the needs of students and faculty members working remotely became a priority as COVID-19 canceled plans for on-campus, in-person classes at our small, liberal arts college. The eventual solution was to develop an online resource to provide asynchronous DH support or to flip synchronous DH instruction. This project, the DH Toolkit, is a collection of tutorials and documentation open to anyone working on digital projects. Specifically, it covers how to use key digital tools, develop accessible user experiences, and navigate copyright concerns.
To complete the toolkit, we hired two undergraduate students who had previously completed a summer-long DH fellowship facilitated by the library. This meant the students were already familiar with some DH tools and concepts, but we needed to review best practices for developing online learning content. Taking inspiration from the literature on project-based learning also proved useful for designing an experience the students would find intellectually rewarding.
For 10 weeks in summer 2020, the presenters and students worked together to define the scope and scale of the planned toolkit, identify the tools and topics to be covered, perform environmental scans to locate existing tutorials and documentation, and create original online learning content. One significant challenge the presenters and students discussed together was maintaining a community of practice and a sense of connectedness since everyone worked remotely for the summer.
This poster will summarize the presenters’ experiences overseeing the project and working with the students to develop an online toolkit for sharing open DH resources. There will be an emphasis on steps taken to make the experience as collaborative as possible so the students could be active contributors throughout the entire process, from conception and design to the development of individual online learning objects. Attendees will leave with ideas for designing and implementing collaborative project-based learning experiences that leverage undergraduates’ existing skills and competencies.
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Type
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Poster
