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SIUE Faculty Uses Web Timeline to Enhance History Course
Posted October 6, 2017
By: Niki Glick
Steve Tamari, professor of historical studies at SIUE, needed a tool to allow his students to build an interactive timeline for his class on World History Since 1500 CE. The project, called "The World and Me," requires students to think about how their lives intersect with the modern world history they are studying. This "intersection of histories" could be in relation to a variety of personal experiences, such as the student's family, hometown, or hobbies. Dr. Tamari presented his problem to the SIUE Instructional Design & Learning Technologies (IDLT) team, who researched multiple options and ultimately suggested TimelineCurator.org.
TimelineCurator is a free, web-based tool that produces attractive, interactive timelines in very little time. Dr. Tamari implemented this tool during his Summer 2017 semester but quickly found that, while this versatile tool has its perks, students had some difficulty using it. In response, IDLT developed an interactive tutorial designed to train Dr. Tamari's teaching assistants so that they, in turn, could teach the students how to use TimelineCurator. The tutorial proved to be an efficient way to train and scale the use of the tool for a class of over 100 students.