Teaching Digital Humanities Online

Prior to the early months of 2020, online teaching had become a growing presence in university curricula though not yet in digital humanities teaching. Then Covid-19 forced all teaching and learning online, notwithstanding the previous disinterest and opposition of many faculty and the flawed learning management system (LMS) platforms that universities had adopted. Two years later, teaching had fitfully and unevenly moved to mask-to-mask teaching on the way to a return to face-to-face classes. Although the ramifications of those processes are not yet fully known, it is already clear that online teaching will not be returning to the place it occupied in curricula before the pandemic. For all the challenges faculty encountered while teaching, and the struggles students faced while learning, university administrators now have concrete examples of the possibilities online delivery offers as well as its pitfalls. Less cynically, so too do teachers and students. If the experience of teaching online that this essay shares is now more common among educators than before the pandemic, the lessons I learned about how to effectively teach digital humanities still have value as we look to move from a pedagogy patched together as best we could in a crisis to a more reflective and sustainable practice.

My reflections on these challenges come out of my experience as part of a team at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), a team that collaborated with the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University (GMU) in 2014 to develop an online graduate certificate in public digital humanities.1 In the U.S. context, a graduate certificate is a credential available to those with an undergraduate degree that involves approximately half the courses of a master’s degree and is typically focused on a specific field of study within a discipline.2 At that time, only a handful of other digital humanities certificates existed in the United States at Michigan State University; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Nebraska; and Texas Tech University. Only the last was taught online and available to students not already enrolled in graduate programs at the institution, and it was narrowly focused on book history and digital humanities. In the years since the course was launched, the landscape has changed significantly: by 2020, there were around thirty graduate certificates in digital humanities on offer in the United States. However, few of those programs share the features of GMU’s program. Where GMU’s certificate is open to any qualified student, nineteen (nearly two-thirds) of other certificates are available only to graduate students already enrolled in master’s and PhD programs at the institution, part of a trend that locates digital methods outside of disciplinary training and limits engagement with how digital tools and methods are transforming scholarship in disciplines. Whereas all three courses in GMU’s certificate are interdisciplinary and designed for the program, almost all the digital humanities certificates include only one or two courses specific to the program, instead relying on elective components drawn from existing offerings in departments. Those courses are often outside the humanities and take no account of humanities sources and questions, leaving certificate students to try to learn in classes designed for a different audience. Only one other certificate, at the University of Iowa, has a focus on public digital humanities, but it is only offered to students already enrolled and is not taught online. There are five online digital humanities certificate programs, but four are taught at small institutions not engaged in high levels of research activity (not R1 schools), and one is available from the University of Missouri School of Information Sciences, which represents one of three graduate certificates offered by information science programs.

The limited number of online digital humanities graduate certificates reflected a widespread skepticism among faculty about online teaching before the pandemic. Many universities had adopted LMS platforms such as Blackboard, Canvas, and Moodle that use discussion boards, quizzes, and video conferencing to provide feedback, facilitate engagement, and deliver content. However, a focus on moving face-to-face courses online, rather than designing courses for the medium of the web, had directed attention to the personal interaction and engagement lost in that shift and made online teaching an unattractive option for faculty. That online courses have been promoted as a vehicle for cost saving and casualization, as tools of the neoliberal university, has frequently served to harden that disinterest into opposition. What remained as the one indisputable benefit of online delivery was access to learning for students unable to participate in face-to-face classes.

In light of this wider context, I argue that what makes the online introductory course I teach as part of GMU’s certificate particularly effective in supporting student learning is a focus on iterative, scaffolded activities. To an extent, this approach is an element of digital humanities teaching that involves working with digital tools or programming, regardless of the mode of delivery. However, the course also used this approach in activities focused on assigned readings and content in other media. As those elements are found in courses across the humanities, I suggest that the effectiveness of this scaffolded, iterative approach in digital humanities offers lessons for graduate education more broadly.

The effectiveness of those iterative, scaffolded online learning activities is closely related to the platform used to deliver the course and to the fit of the activities with the needs of specific groups of students. Delivering the introductory course on a custom-built platform built using the content management system Drupal has given me and the staff at RRCHNM with whom I collaborated the scope to develop an approach different from the options provided by an LMS such as Blackboard, Canvas, or Moodle; it also allowed us to use the features of the online environment rather than trying to reproduce a face-to-face teaching experience. The course design works best for students who were working professionals and for nontraditional students who both needed and were equipped to learn independently and asynchronously. A key lesson I took from this as a teacher was the benefit of not allowing the features offered by an LMS to determine how I approached online teaching. However, the limited scope to pursue those principles in graduate education back in 2019 seems likely to be further foreclosed in the post-Covid context. Few, if any, universities give faculty the option or resources to use an online platform of their own, especially after increased investment in LMS platforms to move all teaching online during the pandemic. Similarly, my other key lesson, reinforced by the experience of teaching during the pandemic, about how online learning works best for specific groups of students is also more difficult to apply after the pandemic. At least some of the courses moved online in response to the pandemic are not returning to face-to-face delivery at many universities. In that sense, a central concern for those engaged in online teaching remains consistent both before and after the pandemic: to what extent do the available platforms and curriculum offer the opportunity to design an effective course for students equipped to learn independently and asynchronously?

In my own efforts to reimagine online teaching in designing and teaching, I found that the context of the graduate certificate as a whole shaped the design of the course I taught, a reminder that our teaching needs to be understood in relation to the curricula as well as institutions in which we teach. Extending an existing partnership with Smithsonian Associates, the fifteen-credit graduate certificate includes a six-credit online internship at a Smithsonian institution and three 3-credit asynchronous courses designed by faculty in the Department of History and Art History, which has offered a separate set of graduate digital history courses with a disciplinary focus since the late 1990s as part of its master’s and PhD programs.3 The learning outcomes of these courses reflect the scale of what can be accomplished in a certificate program: a familiarity with the field of digital humanities and how digital tools and media have transformed research, analysis and presentation in the humanities, and a working knowledge of tools, skills, and processes used to produce digital projects. Shrinking this foundation to allow for a more detailed focus on particular software or programming languages can leave students ill-equipped to think computationally about humanities sources and questions, to conceive digital projects, and to have the digital humanities literacy to mediate between technical and nontechnical staff.4

Delivering the graduate certificate online aligned with the orientation of graduate coursework at GMU toward working professionals, and online delivery was in response to the desire, expressed by graduate students in history and public history at institutions without such offerings, for access to digital history courses like those offered by the department. What made reimagining online delivery feasible was that staff at RRCHNM had expertise with Drupal, expertise that had been honed in projects creating resources for online teaching, providing professional development for teachers and faculty in teaching with digital tools, and teaching shorter online professional development and recertification courses for K–12 teachers.5 Our colleagues’ ability to use Drupal to build a platform for online teaching as an alternative to an LMS freed us to design activities beyond the elaborate structure of content and assessments of an LMS—an option obviously not available at most institutions. Most of the activities we created at their core involved collecting submissions from students and later displaying those submissions so they could be reconsidered and revised, an approach not explicitly offered in an off-the-shelf LMS at the time.

The online course I developed and teach as part of the certificate is Introduction to Digital Humanities. Courses with such a focus are ubiquitous in digital humanities certificates but can be taught in a variety of ways. My course defines a field, surveys methods and projects, and offers limited hands-on work with a range of tools.6 As Ryan Cordell insightfully articulates in “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities,” digital humanists increasingly reject this approach as too shallow in its treatment of topics and skills and are opting for syllabi more narrowly focused on a particular digital method. However, in the context of the GMU certificate, such breadth makes sense, providing as it does a foundation for students going on to courses in digital public history and digital teaching and learning.7 I organized the course around the process of developing a digital project, beginning with gathering sources then creating data and metadata; describing that data; using digital tools to visualize, analyze, and present data; and crowdsourcing and promoting digital projects. Students were asked to both analyze case studies and do hands-on work with a variety of off-the-shelf tools and a dataset created for them, which enabled them to extend their understanding of those case studies and how they might use the tools in their own work. They were then asked to choose one tool to use in a digital project, generally working with sources they had encountered in another class or that were part of collections at the institutions where they worked. With guidance from Kelly Schrum and Jennifer Rosenfeld, in designing the course for online delivery I looked to the properties of the online medium and what possibilities they offered rather than simply replicating my existing face-to-face teaching activities. The resulting course was far from the thorough reimagining of online teaching that I called for at the start of this essay, but it illustrated how building a custom platform in Drupal enabled us to harness the procedural and participatory characteristics of the online medium to make the course interactive.

Shaking free of existing approaches in this way is hard work. Our efforts produced a scaffolded series of activities and tutorials that helped students learn a range of unfamiliar concepts and skills and develop computational thinking. The structure of those elements encouraged more engagement with the course material than the “read and take a quiz or post a response” model baked into LMS-based online courses and produced a more systematic critical engagement with the texts for all students than a typical in-class discussion. Students applied readings to examples through processes of categorization, classification, comparison, creation, and reflection. These activities broke down and made concrete ways of thinking and ensured that each student participated and worked through the material. For example, in a module on defining digital humanities, after activities tracing changed definitions of digital humanities and breaking down the components of those definitions, students were given a brief reading on folksonomies and then a set of projects to review and tag with their digital features. They then reviewed TaDiRAH, a taxonomy of digital research activities, and were allowed to revise their tags using that model. In the final activity, they were presented with word clouds of their two sets of tags and asked to reflect on what had changed and why.8 The response of one student in the 2016 class captured what this approach was able to achieve: “The format of the activities was excellent—they were not things you could breeze through easily, you really needed to think about how each DH project was developed and implemented—and the questions requiring us to compare them all pushed us to think critically.” One drawback of this scaffolding, however, is its inflexibility: some students grasped concepts more quickly than others and were frustrated that they had to work through multiple examples in an activity, whereas others reported that they needed that variety and repetition. Nonetheless, the experience of having to scaffold and make visible the learning I aimed to promote made me rethink my reliance on discussion in graduate classes, and it led me to look to include some more structured activities to model and highlight ways of thinking and reflecting.

Tutorials were another approach that worked well when transposed to the online context of this course. The tutorial is a well-established genre in digital humanities education highlighted by ongoing projects such as the Programming Historian, which publishes peer-reviewed online tutorials for a range of platforms and programming languages associated with conducting specific tasks, and the exemplary classroom-focused tutorials of UCLA digital humanist Miriam Posner.9 When our GMU students worked with software, we provided carefully written step-by-step tutorials with embedded, annotated images, which were revised over time to remove ambiguities and errors. This is essentially the same approach taken in many face-to-face digital humanities classes, an element that makes the field particularly amenable to online teaching. The narrow scope of tutorials fits the nature of the skills taught in digital humanities classes, as they focus on concrete, specific research problems rather than generalized, abstract problems. However, in a face-to-face setting, teachers are on hand to troubleshoot in person and can respond relatively quickly, depending on the size of the class and the number of students who experience problems. In an asynchronous online class, troubleshooting via Slack or email generally means a time lag in responding that students can find frustrating (although because I am online far more than is good for me, that time lag is often quite short). Having to wait for help can also encourage students to try to seek solutions themselves, which they rarely do in class, helping them gain the confidence to tap into the opportunities for self-taught digital humanities skills. Students overwhelmingly reported finding the tutorials an effective hands-on means of understanding the digital tools and how they work and of understanding the perspectives offered in the readings and activities.

One major limitation of tutorials is that students can successfully complete one without necessarily understanding what they have done. One way that this might be mitigated is to set up collaborative annotation of the tutorials, which has the flexibility to be a vehicle for providing explanations of what is being done, soliciting explanations from students, and discussing specific issues where they appear. When resources permit, creating video versions of tutorials would improve accessibility, provide the opportunity for more commentary on the instructions, and cater to increasing numbers of students accustomed to platforms such as YouTube and TikTok who express a preference for video. As it is, we addressed the limits of tutorials primarily by having each student complete a project using one of the off-the-shelf tools introduced in the course, which allowed us to assess the limits of what they had learned.

The approach I took in my online course for the GMU graduate certificate worked particularly well for students who were working professionals. Librarians, archivists, teachers, and faculty made up roughly half of the seventy students who enrolled in my course from 2014 to 2019. They came to the course with a sense of what digital humanities is and why it matters to them and the field in which they work; they generally had a project in mind; and they managed their time carefully. Such students reported appreciating how much they learned about exploring and evaluating digital tools in a way that could be directly applied to their work. The other major constituency for the certificate are students enrolled in the master’s degree offered by the Department of History and Art History or who recently completed their undergraduate degree; this group generally have a somewhat different experience.10 Few of those students have any sense of what digital humanities is when they enroll in the course and are frequently following advice that digital humanities will complement their degree or set them up for work in public humanities. Consequently, they are simultaneously being introduced to a humanities field and learning how it is being transformed. The students in the master’s program also struggle to balance the mix of active and passive learning inherent to the online certificate program courses and the face-to-face classes they are taking as part of their degree track, and they struggle to dedicate the time needed to complete the scaffolded activities. This group of students is also generally intimidated by digital technology; as a result, they tend to find the course more work than they expected. At the same time, the students who successfully complete the course report having the foundation for further work in digital humanities, a key learning outcome for the certificate, and they often express this in terms of increased confidence. One student in 2019 reported that the activities allowed them to “gain confidence in our abilities to interact with cool digital platforms,” and another in the same class wrote, “I came out of this course with more knowledge than I envisioned and with the courage to continue with the certificate program.”

These varied outcomes for online teaching are not unique to digital humanities teaching, of course. Online courses in other fields have often produced good outcomes for working and nontraditional students, both of whom need and are equipped to learn independently and asynchronously. Students mixing face-to-face and online classes and with less background knowledge and confidence have more uneven outcomes. Nonetheless, online courses such as my Introduction to Digital Humanities can be effective in teaching digital humanities by incorporating established formats such as tutorials and building scaffolded, iterative, and reflective inquiry-based activities to develop the ability to think computationally, with the advantage of the flexibility and accessibility that asynchronous teaching offers. Assembled from courses in this form, an online graduate certificate can contribute to a future digital humanities education a foundation that enables students to conceive digital research projects and equips them to identify and gain the skills to analyze their sources and answer their research questions in critically robust ways that demonstrate their adaptability to a rapidly changing world.