NHC Announces New Humanities in Class Digital Library

The National Humanities Center is pleased to announce the launch of the Humanities in Class Digital Library, an Open Education Resources (OER) platform. The platform is available to educators, scholars, and independent learners seeking high quality educational content on a wide range of humanities topics and subject areas.

The Humanities in Class Digital Library provides free and open access to all of the National Humanities Center’s educational resources as well as thousands of resources contributed by partner organizations across the humanities landscape. Users are also provided with a “library card,” granting them access to the full functionality of the OER space, allowing them to easily discover, remix, and share materials. For example, users can:

• Search and discover exceptional humanities education content including curated collections on topics such as “Teaching About Race, Place, and Social Justice” and “Voting and Why It Matters.”
• Collect and save resources from over 40 trusted content providers to build a curriculum collection suited to specific teaching needs.
• Create and publish a lesson or activity for classroom use that can be shared with other educators in a central workspace.
• Collaborate and communicate with like-minded scholars, educators, and experts from across the globe through network hubs.

“Presenting our materials on an OER platform significantly increases the potential uses of NHC’s materials and will allow educators to actively engage with those materials in new and exciting ways,” says Andy Mink, vice president for education programs at the Center. “Members can search by topic, curate resources, and save them to a private folder, creating their own thematically organized collections.”

Mink continued, “Another important feature of the Digital Library is the ability to combine materials from dozens of other high-quality humanities content providers. We’re adding resources every day from organizations like the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, the Duke Consortium for Latin American Studies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Members can evaluate these resources, apply key terms and standards as appropriate, and remix and modify them to meet their individual teaching needs. Members can also publish their own instructional resources, completing the scope and depth of the Library with classroom-ready materials.”

The Humanities in Class Digital Library was developed with generous support from the Grateful American Foundation.

To learn more about the Humanities in Class Digital Library, visit education.nationalhumanitiescenter.org/about.

About the National Humanities Center