Curating History Datasets and Training Materials as OER: An Experience

Evidence shows that practice-based learning is beneficial to students’ understanding of threshold concepts in all disciplines. Teaching activities that draw on research data provide students with real-world examples of how they might apply this new knowledge, and this reinforces their understanding. While research data from projects in disciplines such as computer science or economics is widely published, it is only recently that humanities scholars, in particular historians, have started considering publishing their research data in digital format. Using a case study of a 5-year funded collaborative project between historians and computer scientists, this paper discusses how the research data was created and applied in a classroom context, providing students with a ’real-world’ experience of working as a historian. It shows how the project data developed from a basic transcription of historical records into a fully enriched open dataset that can be used by teachers from a range of disciplines including history, historical geography, demography, computer science and medicine/medical humanities. It concludes that lessons planned around such open research data comprise a valuable educational resource to teachers and students.