Designing Engaging Assessments for Teaching the Digital Humanities

Abstract

Humanities are pertinent to the digital culture of today. This chapter details how non-Humanities students are engaged in “Digital Humanities: From Text to txt,” a team taught, multidisciplinary course offered at the University of Auckland since 2016. Engagement across five Humanities disciplines—Art History, English Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies—is unified with the common theme of the “digital turn.” The course is modular with each discipline given a two-week block in a twelve-week semester. Students learn with and about technologies through a range of digital forms of engagement encountered in the Humanities. The course builds on students' digital curiosity to revisit questions of personal identity, ethics and belief, meaning, creativity, and historical understanding. Engagement begins in the lecture and tutorial and is deepened via five short assessments and an online final examination. Over the two iterations of the course, student satisfaction and pass rate was high and enrolments increased by 20%.

An open educational resource for doing netnography in the digital arts and humanities

“…Deciding to use SNA through exploring tools is pedagogically informed by digital humanities pedagogy. Teaching is done from and through digital skills (Hirsch, 2012), as integrative learning (Nyhan et al, 2014), and based on the value of authentic technology-integrated learning (Datt et al, 2020). Of particular importance is scaffolding and play in a balanced way (Tracy & Elizabeth, 2017), enabling students to explore and assess their work according to what is important, valuable, and "good" in relation to their own interest of learning.…”