Projects for the class involve analyzing and writing about artifacts from the Hoover Archives, including Nazi propaganda posters, recordings of Hitler's speeches, and photographs of Hitler taken by his official photographer. Last quarter, to maximize her students' exposure to the Hoover collections, Wyle constructed a Web page containing samples of materials from those collections. The page also contains the course syllabus and links to outside Web resources relevant to the class. Wyle says that she and her students have found the page to be very useful. She uses it as a presentation tool and as raw material for assignments.
Students use it for research and review, and also as a place to display their finished projects.
In fact, the Web page and the class were so successful last quarter that several students volunteered to make a short video about their experiences in the class. Wyle worked with the Curriculum Development Lab to build the Web page. CDL staff helped her include video and sound clips in the page, and scan images from the archives. The Hoover Archives allowed students in the class to borrow slides, so that they could take them to Meyer Library and scan them for use in their presentations and papers. To use the scanning equipment, students had to take workshops offered by the Multimedia Studio, which means that they spent a few hours outside of class learning new skills.