Making History at Loughborough

Working with Professor Chris Szejnmann, Head of History, as part of his Teaching Innovation Award, we’ve developed a new e-learning authoring tool called Make History which enables Chris and his colleagues easily to create Flash-based historical timelines without the need for any technical skills. Each timeline is exported by the tool to a single *.zip file which can be uploaded to Learn.

There are a number of free timeline authoring tools available on the Web but the Loughborough tool scores in terms of its suitability for HE.

Make History still needs further development work to fulfil its potential but it is already sufficiently functional to be usable by academic colleagues in History or indeed in other disciplines where it is useful to illustrate the development of theories etc through a scrolling timeline.

Once you’ve set the start and end dates for your timeline, you can add an introduction, colour-coded themes and events, and each event can have an image or short audio clip associated with it.

If you’d like to try it out, get in touch via c.f.g.shields [at] lboro.ac.uk .