History coming alive with Timeline JS: Collaboration on a digital pedagogy project

From idea to implementation, this CIE will show how a faculty member and an instructional designer developed a digital pedagogy and humanities assignment for a History course, using TimelineJS as a tool for engaging and inspiring students to create their own digital timelines, and thus develop their digital literacies.

This CIE will showcase a TimelineJS project used for a digital pedagogy assignment. It came about after one of us was inspired during AMICAL 2018 by the workshop on digital tools, specifically TimelineJS, which fit perfectly in the context of this course. The CIE would showcase the Timeline we created to share with the students, as well as possibly showcase student-created timelines. We would also show/share, the assignment documents we created, to guide students on producing stellar timelines, so that audience members aiming to develop similar projects could use them as templates to get the ball rolling on their projects with. We will also discuss how we collaborated as faculty member and instructional designer (staff) at AUC to produce a multimedia/digital assignment for students to develop both their understanding of the course content as well as their digital literacies and skills. The course we implemented this project in is titled ‘Hidden Stories of WWII’ which makes Timelines fit nicely since the course focuses on many different themes and fronts of WWII, America, England, Germany, France and North Africa, which could be confusing for a learner. The timeline visuals give learners “the big picture” both linearly and laterally.