Integrating digital projects in the classroom: Presentations of projects at Franklin University Switzerland and Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane

Student-centered solutions in sustaining a digital humanities project

Our presentation presents challenges and offers solutions on sustaining collaborative information and digital literacy projects between library and faculty, based upon our experience developing AUI’s Omeka-based project, In and Through Morocco. This undergraduate course module combines our library’s special collection of 19th- and 20th-century European travelogues with an online exhibition, to guide students through issues of orientalism and empire. Teaching and service commitments for faculty and informational scientists have challenged our small team to seek innovative solutions to sustain our project’s development throughout the busy academic year. Following from the ideas and suggestions offered in the DHI-B 2019 workshops, we drew upon students in the courses for which the module was designed and integrated elements of building the digital project into course assessment, such as having students select passages from the travelogues, design modules, and complete bibliographical informational literacy projects. Our presentation will focus on our experiences, with an aim to offer concrete ideas and solutions to AMICAL members interested in using classroom-based student-centered model to build and sustain similar projects.

Cross-professional collaboration: How we incorporated digital humanities in an academic travel course

This presentation is about our venture to make an Academic Travel course in literature go digital. We will explain how colleagues from IT, Faculty and Library had to interact to imagine and customize a platform designed to address a recurrent challenge of the liberal arts: how to make a literature class accessible and appealing for a broad range of incoming students with diverse expectations who are not (currently) planning to major in literature.

Instead of a diary project and group poster, students creatively and dynamically pin their digital essay components to an online multimedia map. In this way, they develop the ability to work with CMS, basic html, and semantic data while respecting copyright.

• Daniel Twumasi (IT) will address the technological aspects (tool choice, set up, creation).
• Clélie Riat (Library) will talk about bringing the tool to the classroom as well as giving students the necessary copyright law basis.
• Kate Roy (Faculty) will discuss the benefits of the tool in its ability to be used as an experiential learning platform and to innovate teaching practices and student learning goals.

Through this presentation, attendees will come to understand the integral role of IT-Faculty-Library collaboration in enabling and supporting digital project development.