History Online Challenges and Curriculum Engineering durring the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This article focuses on teaching and learning strategies and curriculum shifts in light of our large first-year History module ‘The Making of the Modern World’ (HIST 104) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal during the first few months of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. This course was designed to encourage our students to consider the issue of globalisation, pushing them to move beyond the nation-state focus of much of school taught history. The importance of the connection between different peoples and regions is a central focus of this course and this article. Here we reflect on re-thinking our strategies for our first-year course in our present – globalised and connected but still vastly unequal – teaching and learning world. While we have used Moodle for years as an aid to accompany our face-to-face teaching of our first-year students, during the pandemic we were confronted with developing a fully online teaching approach, but with a myriad of challenges and inequalities due to students’ poor access to technology and digital services. This article, therefore, highlights the approach we took and challenges we faced teaching our HIST 104 module amid this pandemic and how it pushed two historians to reevaluate and reconceptualise their teaching material.