Making History (again) 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.

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 . video clip associated with it.

Since my original post about Make History last August, the tool has had further development work and is now close to fulfilling its potential. Applications of the tool are not limited to History; it could be used in any other discipline where it is useful to illustrate the development of theories etc through a scrolling timeline.

If you’d like to try it out, get in touch via c.f.g.shields [at] lboro.ac.uk . You can also view the Make History support pages at https://blog.lboro.ac.uk/makehistory .