Report on UCLA activities in conjuction with H-Net Multimedia Grants:

• Jan Reiff developed a course, Hypermedia and History, that explored hypermedia theory and its application to the presentation of historical information. The quarter-long course was offered in winter 1996 to five UCLA undergraduates, eight UCLA graduate students, and auditors from California State University at Fullerton and local historical hypermedia projects. The syllabus for the quarter was also used at universities in Michigan and Illinois. [Please note that some of the links embedded in the syllabus may now be obsolete. I have not updated the site since last spring.]

  An optional second quarter was offered to graduate students and auditors to develop web sites based on their own research. Three of the students will be presenting their sites at the Pacfic Coast Branch meetings of the American Historical Association meetings in August.

• Two UCLA graduate students, Jennifer Koslow and Chris Gantner, attended the workshop at the University of Virginia last summer. The NEH grant provided travel expenses for one of these students, a grant to the history department from UCLA's Chancellor's Committee on Instructional Both students were enrolled in the Hypermedia in History class above.
• With additional funding from the CCIIP (above),Gantner has been working with four UCLA faculty members in developing web sites for the new lower division American history survey course offered for the first time this year. The faculty have used the web in very different ways. Their experiences and the students' evaluations will be summarized at the end of the year and the results will be presented at the H-Net Multimedia Conference.
• Koslow (with some H-Net funds) has been developing a variety of web sites for history courses across the UCLA curriculum. She has been meeting with faculty to design web-based applications and developing them for particular classes. Altogether, some dozen classes are now using the web in some ways.
• With the financial assistance of the Office of the President, University of California, and the staff support of the UCLA History Department, Reiff, Koslow, several participants in the hypermedia class, including Nancy Fitch of Cal State-Fullerton, and Mike Franks (Social Science Computing, UCLA)offered a one-day workshop on Using the World Wide Web to Teach American History in September, 1996. Teaching assistants selected from each campus of the University of California came to UCLA where they considered the possibilities of hypermedia as a learning tool and designed sample web pages for teaching.
• We are just beginning to collect information on how the knowledge gained at that workshop has been used on the different campuses. At UCLA, the two participants are developing a site on how to write an effective history essay and one of them had students construct a web site for their introductory course. They have also organized a brown bag seminar on teaching with multimedia, another on hypermedia, and an upcoming one day seminar modeled roughly on the all UC seminar.
• Reiff has commented on two hypermedia sessions at the AHA. In August, she and Fitch will be presenting web materials developed in conjuction with the hypermedia class and the CCIIP grant at a conference on Improving University Teaching in Brazil.