ABSTRACT
This chapter asks: how can instructors effectively teach about the role of digital technology in the humanities in an era in which the power and potential of digital technology grows so rapidly? To begin to answer this question, this chapter starts its discussion of course design in the digital humanities at the course's end. The “backward design” of courses has been foundational to the science of teaching and learning for over twenty years now and yet many instructors at the collegiate level fail to structure courses with the method's most basic question—what are my objectives in this course?—in mind. This begin-at-the-end approach is critical to producing high quality courses generally and provides a promising approach to courses in quick-changing fields of study. Next, this essay places digital humanities courses within the context of the broader humanities curriculum. Regardless of the department or program in which a digital humanities course is housed, its function in a given curriculum is most closely akin to that of a methodology course and this chapter illustrates how digital humanists can creatively draw upon the literature on teaching methodology courses. Too often, though, methodology courses focus on the theoretical arguments of how to study a given subject at the expense of the supplementary skills necessary for enacting a given research method. To avoid this mistake and to offer students practical preparation for research in the ever-changing field of digital humanities, this essay concludes with a discussion of how to integrate the most important supplementary skill for any digital humanist: effective collaboration. Across its consideration of these strategies, this essay offers educators in the digital humanities practical solutions backed by evidence from the science of teaching and learning literature for keeping course content relevant in the face of the ever-shifting sands of digital technologies.
