A Pedagogy That Spans Semesters

François Berger for The Chronicle

T he college seminar is a productive space. Every semester, students’ discussions, papers, and projects produce a wealth of knowledge that expands the core focus of a course. But the life of this student-generated knowledge is almost always short. Class discussions rarely survive outside of the ephemera they produce, such as notes and forums. Even term papers and slide decks are at best saved but seldom shared. We often brag about the insightfulness of our students, but we do little to retain their insights, and we do even less to ensure that any knowledge that is preserved will help educate the next cohort.

Until this past semester, while I, too, was in awe of the knowledge my seminar students produced, I didn’t know how — and didn’t even really think about how — to carry their wisdom from one semester to the next. A handy digital tool, however, now allows me to do just that.

When I first created my “Risk & Society” seminar in 2014, I decided to craft an assignment around TimelineJS, an open-source, cloud-based tool from Northwestern University’s Knight Lab, which encourages media innovation. The assignment called for students to create succinct timeline entries for important events related to the history of risk and risk management, particularly those that they learned about in their original research. Their entries included historical events relating to the probability theory outlined by the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, and contemporary events such as the Japanese nuclear disaster.

To create these entries, students simply add text to a Google Spreadsheet template, providing information for several categories, including the dates of the event, a title, summary text, and media links to an image, audio file, or video. The push of a “publish” button draws all the information from the spreadsheet and creates a beautiful, interactive timeline. Students loved the ease of the tool and were surprised at the sophistication of the result. At the end of the semester, we moved through the timeline and discussed what this collaborative product revealed (and also what its linearity concealed). But despite the consensus that it put the semester’s readings and research in a new perspective, once the semester concluded, the timeline seemed destined to gather digital dust.

W hen I went to tweak the course for its second run last fall, I again decided to use the timeline assignment, and looked back upon what the first course had produced. What I found was a trove of knowledge — a mature understanding of the course themes and a presentation of a wonderful constellation of events in the “risk society” born of the research conducted by students in the course’s first offering. In that moment, something dawned on me: Why wipe the slate clean? Why erase such knowledge? Why not use it as a foundation to build upon?

And so I left the spreadsheet intact. I introduced the existing timeline at the beginning of the course, and made adding entries a weekly assignment for each student. By seeing the work of previous students, the new students were able to draw on the timeline as a foundational resource to help inspire their research. And by distributing the entry assignments over the course of the semester, the tool became a dynamic, consistently updated space that allowed students to share important readings and research.

The true lesson here, though, actually has little to do with TimelineJS in particular. For me, TimelineJS opened up a new form of pedagogy — a multi-semester approach. It took the knowledge students had produced in one semester and not only preserved it in an accessible (and downright elegant) form, but also allowed it to educate future students. With its dynamism and sleek aesthetics, the timeline bests classic reference supplements such as glossaries or even wikis.

Knight Lab’s tool works very well in my history course, and I have little doubt it would work well in other courses in history, English, journalism, and even fields like geology or astronomy. However, adopting a multi-semester mindset holds promise for courses in any field. By using the plethora of open-source, open-access digital tools, faculty members at any institution can create assignments that capture that knowledge and retain it to help instruct and inspire future students.

W hat makes an appropriate digital tool for a multi-semester project has little to do with its look and everything to do with its simplicity, stability, and fit. An appropriate tool will take less than a half-period to learn; unless the course is about using digital tools, keep things basic. An appropriate tool will have a strong university, company, or foundation backing it, ensuring that it will still be available next semester. And above all, an appropriate tool will help you accomplish the learning objectives of your course.

Of course, such tools present challenges. The first cohort of students has the tall task of building the foundation for those who follow. They will lack models and will have to deal with the glitches and errors that come with using a new technology for the first time. The second and third classes will find the low-hanging fruit already picked. And by the fourth turn, the exercise may have run its course. When I teach my “Risk & Society” seminar again later this year (for the third time), I suspect that this third cohort will exhaust the events worthy of inclusion on the timeline. And that’s OK: Even after the exercise runs its course as an assignment, the timeline can still serve as a reference for students.

That’s a heartening proposition for a historian especially, but something that faculty members in any field can appreciate.

Benjamin Wiggins is the director of digital-learning initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania and an instructor in Penn’s history department.