10c) The History Workshop Challenge – Puzzles and Communities

James Pearson (History)

Type:	Presentation
Time:	Second Session (12:20 – 13:20)
Location:	Inox Conference Suite 2

What is this session about?
To help our students make the step up to university-level historical study we introduced a new Level 1 module this year called ‘History Workshop’. This module encouraged students to consider the following questions…How do professional historians go about their work? What skills do they need? And, how do they develop them? To help answer these questions the History Workshop used a variety of online learning environments to allow students to work at their own pace and to solve a variety of research-based problems and puzzles using a bespoke ‘Puzzle Card’ system developed in collaboration with the University of Leicester. We called this the History Workshop Challenge. A MOLE organisation and Google Community formed part of the wider learning environment to facilitate discussion around the puzzles. Then to acknowledge the skills that our students developed over the course of the puzzle challenge we awarded accolades based on Mozilla’s Open Badges initiative.

How will colleagues benefit?
Colleagues will be able to share from the experiences of the History Department in using a variety of different online learning environments together to facilitate an assessed part of a Level 1 module.