Blurring the Parameters: Distance Education, Globalization, and Effective Pedagogical Approaches in History

Distance education offers historians the opportunity to renegotiate the boundaries of the discipline and blur the lines that separates us from other intellectual communities.  In the overlap between conventional disciplines emerge new analytical categories, reconceptualized questions and complex connections.  A web of meaning, often overlooked, emerges when one employs distance education to expand the scope of history. 

Distance education offers new and varied ways to teach and learn historical information. It also offers greater accessibility to populations that would otherwise be underrepresented in American colleges and universities. New technologies afford historians the opportunity to expand the range of informational delivery methods, explore new pedagogical approaches, engage students in synchronous and asynchronous environments, and ultimately expand access to historical knowledge by globalizing the teaching and learning of history.

This proposal is for an interactive computer based component augmented by a visual poster. This collaborative work combines high quality, historical content with the latest pedagogical approaches to distance education in an interactive, online course.  The content for this course is 20_th century popular culture but the model can be applied to any historical topic, geographic region, or time period.  The poster component will focus on general aspects of course construction including: effective electronic delivery methods, course content selection, teaching strategies, and assessment. The electronic component will consist of the complete, interactive course including primary source images and documents, lesson plans, complete assessments, sample interactions, and information on additional resources. The poster and electronic presentation allows for more informal yet highly focused discussion with conference attendees. 

The purpose of this project is to showcase the collaborative creation of an effective, high-quality, trans-disciplinary, online, history course. Incorporating new technology into the study of 20th century popular culture allows for reconceptualization of historical information, attention to varied learning styles and innovative trans-disciplinary connections.  Analysis of visual sources and electronic interactivity are pedagogical approaches underutilized by historians. This new approach to communicating historical information and changing the dynamic of discussion will have a profound impact on both scholarship and learning outcomes.