“The stories are like magnets”

Multimedia education is a growing space for collaboration and open-source learning. World War One: A History in 100 Stories was a major milestone in massive online open courses, enabling learners engage with challenging, academic content in online spaces. The course was linked to emerging scholarship on the Great War, contextualising individual stories of the trauma war visited on diverse communities. Its centrepiece was the acclaimed exhibition “Love and Sorrow” at Museums Victoria. The MOOC attracted over 50,000 enrolments from all over the world. They interrogated the past in multifaceted and often contradictory ways, helped (and hindered) by digital technology. This article describes some of the challenges faced in building and executing a massive online open course. It also offers insight into the way the Great War is remembered.