Teaching with collaborative digital textbooks

For the past two years I’ve experimented with a new pedagogical tool in my undergraduate courses: collaborative digital textbooks.

Using MediaKron, a WYSIWYG website builder developed at Boston College, where I teach, I created companion websites for two undergraduate seminars in medieval English poetry. MediaKron is a proprietary product of the Center for Teaching Excellence at BC, currently available to select partner institutions, but you can compose similar websites with Weebly or WordPress.

The idea is to build an intellectual resource and then invite students to contribute. In the first half of the semester, I use the MediaKron website as a textbook to convey basic information about the subject matter. In the second half of the semester, students break up into teams of three or four, take on specialized roles, and research, write, design, and publish new pages on the site. [read more]

Inside Higher Ed 14 June 2017