Digital History as MOOC

Despite the growing relevance of the digital humanities, their place and role in the traditional university system of humanities education is still not strong enough. Especially if we are not talking about the humanities as a whole, but about individual areas, for example, history. In the field of history, traditional research methods and educational programs based on them prevail with a significant margin. This situation is especially noticeable in Russia, where there is a significant shortage of educational literature on digital history, the use of literature is difficult due to language barriers. At the moment, the only educational book on digital humanities in Russian is “Defining Digital Humanities“ edited by M. Terras, J. Nyhan, E. Vanhoutte, and I. Kizhner (Terras et al. 2017). The only textbook on digital history (historical information science) was published in 1996 (edited by L. I. Borodkin and I. M. Garskova) (Belova et al. 1996).

On the other hand, the digital transformation of education makes new formats of educational content, in particular massive open online courses, a demand. However, such courses in digital history are not even available in English. Moreover, even massive open online courses in the digital humanities as a whole are still a rarity. In fact, the only courses in this format are the course “Introduction to Digital Humanities” released by Harvard University in 2019 from EdX and the course “Introduction in Digital Humanities” from DARIAH-teach.

Thus, the goal of our research is to develop a system of educational materials on digital history, both for online and traditional university programs. In this paper, we present a part of our project, there is the massive open online course (MOOC) Digital History, developed at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. The course is placed on the national platform of open online courses “Open Education”; it is free (except for a certificate) and corresponds to three ECTS.

The course comprehensively and systematically describes a set of approaches, methods, technologies and tools for working with historical information in the field of science, education, and popularization of history. The course discusses the possibilities and limitations of different methods and technologies, which is done on the example of Russian and foreign cases. Most of the software used in the course is free or has functional demo versions. If there are online services, they are preferred over programs that require installation on local computers. This makes the study of the course the most flexible.

The course consists of nine topics:

1. Introduction. What is a digital story?
2. Coding and modeling of historical information. History data.
3. Historical information systems and databases.
4. Analysis and digital editions of historical texts.
5. Network modeling of historical data.
6. Spatial analysis and visualization of historical data.
7. Mathematical methods in historical research.
8. Digital methods for audiovisual sources and material objects.
9. (Digital) history outside of the academy.

As usual for MOOCs, the course consists of short video lectures from 8 to 15 minutes. Each topic contains additional materials, including literature, recommended resources and software, tests with 10-15 questions for self-control, some of the topics include practical tasks and essays. The final exam tests theory and practice in methods, tools, and projects in digital history. This exam is conducted with proctoring.

The relevance of the course is associated with the digital transformation of society and science, changes in the expectations of the employer from university graduates and the growing demand for those who combine humanitarian and technical knowledge. This increases the importance of training historian students who have instrumental competencies and know effective scientific methods based on digital technologies.

The course was launched for the first time in September 2019, with more than 1800 students on the course. This session ended in December 2019. In February 2020 the second launch of the course was started with 900 students. During the coronavirus lockdown period, the course was included in the list of recommended MOOCs for universities by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation. The Digital History MOOC is intended for undergraduate and master programs. It can be used both for self-education and blended education (a special curricula for blended education was developed). The course can be used for teaching courses such as Digital History, Digital Humanities, Information technology in historical research, Historical information science, Digital Literacy and adapted for teaching other IT courses for humanitarians.