Most of the online courses we offer in the History Department are surveys covering a broad span of history. Many of us therefore feel trapped by the amount of material we have to cover to give a full impression of the scope of the class. Class sessions and modules become defined by broad and breathless narrative combined with a smattering of primary sources from a reader with bare any relation to each other. This is a comfortable way to teach but it can put a lot of onus on the teacher (how do you become so informed on such disparate topics) while presenting students with a burdensome amount of information.
One way to break this reliance on narrative is to give your students case studies to work through in each unit instead of giving them more material from the narrative they can get from a textbook or online videos. You can present materials connected to a theme like disease or women related to the period your students are reading about from. Doing this in an online course also offers you the opportunity to use materials from different media in the study. In the olden days our department used a series of these in the form of Retrieving the American Past and Experiencing the European Past. An example I use in my classes looks like this:
How connected was the Roman Empire?
- A short video describing the topic and its relation to the readings for the week/module.
- A description of Monte Testaccio in Rome (a hill made of discarded pottery) from archeology.org.
- A link to ORBIS, a “Google Maps” for imperial Rome.
- Descriptions of travel in the Roman empire: Bordeaux Itinerary and a couple of other.
- A discussion page for students to answer a series of questions.
Case studies allow teachers to bring in a series of sources and media related to one main theme or issue. This allows you to run a focused discussion where even students who do not complete all the readings can participate effectively. It also allows you to focus more on the skills history can offer to students allowing them to think critically about sources in one topic instead of focusing on narratives.