Since 2011 the Department of Information Studies at UCL has offered the highly successful MA/MSc in Digital Humanities that regularly attracts highly qualified PGT students, often with advanced degrees in other humanities and heritage related subjects; around 50% of these are overseas students with the rest mainly from continental Europe. With no current DH undergraduate programmes, there is no direct route into this Master’s and so all applicants demonstrate a willingness to take on new challenges in an area that is new to them. A significant number are mature students with many years of professional experience and this programme is a unique opportunity for CPD and skills development.
Following on from an initial Open Educational Resources project, external funding has been secured for the creation of more open teaching resources and is being used to set up an introductory postgraduate level MOOC on FutureLearn. The MOOC will be suitable for those wanting to find out more about our collaborative and research-based approach to DH in a massive open online context and will enable learners to preview high quality teaching resources and the UCL teaching and learning experience.
This presentation will report and reflect on what has been learned from the process of designing and delivering the MOOC, which draws on examples from recent and ongoing research projects (e.g. from ‘ASYMENC’, a large-scale text mining project of digitised newspaper collections for cultural and historical enquiry). In addition, it will reflect on how the experience of direct student involvement can be fed back into our campus based modules. Employing graduate students, with academic time limited to the design and development of resources and activities, provides them with practical hands-on experience of developing and delivering teaching and learning resources and to integrate research into their training. This is closely aligned to the principles of the UCL Connected Curriculum where students learn through participating in research as part of their studies and impact on the development of innovative practice in campus teaching.