During the Spring 2017 semester, Visiting Arts Professor, Fawzia Afzal Khan, used NYU Web Publishing in order to create a multimedia learning space, and a publicly viewable forum, for her Muslim Popular Culture class. Staff from the Center for Digital Scholarship first met with Professor Khan to do a needs assessment for her course content, and to get an understanding of what it was she hoped to achieve with her students that wasn’t possible given the variety of other technologies available to her. Rather than have her students develop a standard annotated bibliography, she hoped to incorporate multimedia in order to more fully represent the course material, which itself deals with music, film, television and text. She also wanted her students to be able to read and comment on their peers’ scholarship, and for her students to be able to engage with a tool that itself contributes to pop culture, such as a blog or website.
We worked with her students to help them understand how to use the tool, including how to create a class media library, and then helped them understand the use of tags to organize content on a micro level, and larger subject headings to organize on a macro level. Each student had their own page assigned to them. Initially, we kept the site private to only those in the class, and then at Professor Khan’s request, made it public so that she could highlight her students’ work over the course of the semester, to a larger audience.
Muslim Popular Culture can be viewed here.
Interested in incorporating NYU Web Publishing or other digital research tools into your class? Contact the Center for Digital Scholarship (nyuad.cds@nyu.edu) to discuss your curricular needs.