ARCS Team Presents Poster at Educause ELI Conference
May 6, 2019Share story
The Academic and Research Computing聽Services聽(ARCS) team presented a poster鈥痶itled, 鈥淒igital Humanities: Integrating Scalar into an Undergraduate American Studies Course鈥� at the Educause ELI Conference on Feb. 21 in Anaheim, CA.
The team investigated students鈥� experience using Scalar, an open-source scholarly publishing tool that can be used to create media-rich content, in聽LIT 179X Zora Neale Hurston: Theories of Race, Science, and Art. This course was taught by Professor Isabel聽Balseiro, who received a Digital Course Development Grant from the Mellon Foundation. The team helped with the course design and聽taught two workshops on Scalar for the students when the course was taught in Spring 2018 and Fall 2018. We also聽conducted two rounds聽of interviews to learn about students鈥� feedback on the Scalar component聽of the course.聽Based on the students鈥� feedback we were able to make several聽instructional design recommendations.
Overall, the team believed that Scalar served as a valuable tool for teaching the course with its features such as media integration, visual display of classwork, writing collaboratively in non-sequential order, and easy integration of creative components (Google Map, Timeline JS, etc.). The research concluded聽that聽scaffolding strategies聽are particularly important when integrating a tool like聽Scalar. The team hopes that the data-based instructional design recommendations they provided for integrating Scalar could help both students and instructors accrue greater educational benefits. They聽ultimately aim at pointing out best practices for integrating this tool into the broader ecosystem of Digital Humanities.
If you have any聽questions or comments about this聽research, please contact the ARCS team at聽arcs-l@g.hmc.edu.
ARCS team members are:
- Elizabeth聽Hodas,聽Senior Director,聽ARCS
- James Sadler, Instructional Technologist
- Yi Luo, Instructional Designer
- Aashita聽Kesarwani, Scientific Computing Specialist