As part of the second-year undergraduate module, The Supernatural in Early-Modern Britain, Dr Martha McGill requires students to work together in groups to create a digital showcase, exploring a specific aspect of the module. The digital showcases consist of a set of webpages that explore a theme chosen by the students using source material selected from the wider module content. While the students were expected to work together on the overall structure and coherence of the webpages, they also contributed their own individual analyses of historical sources. The digital showcases were pitched to a general audience and the students used SiteBuilder to put them together. Following the completion of the task, students came together for a workshop in which they reflected on their own showcases and gave feedback to their peers. Although the assessed digital showcases were not made public, students were also offered the option of contributing to a public resource.

In using digital showcases as an assessment tool, Dr McGill hopes to vary the students’ experience of the module and encourage them to think about communicating complex ideas to a wider non-academic audience. It also gives students practical experience of putting together an online resource. For example, students were encouraged to think about accessibility, image copyright and user experience.