The attraction of TimeLine JS was that it was FREE, and that we could drive it from a Google Spreadsheet. \u00a0We wanted to use timelines in two ways, to provide a course overview at the beginning, and to show the ridiculously fast turnover of emperors in the 3rd and 4th centuries.<\/p>\n
TImelineJS was easy to set up, but we found that the number of items we wanted to plot meant that it was just a bit too confusing. \u00a0The tool would have worked well if we had wanted to give a lot of detail (and had a picture for each item), but for us the space usage on the screen didn’t work so well. There’s a screenshot of our quick test below (you can also see the actual timeline<\/a> and the google sheet<\/a>\u00a0we used to create it).<\/p>\n For our purposes Tiki-Toki gave a better learner experience. \u00a0We liked a number of things – there were a number of views (we could set a default), it was searchable, and we could categorise our emperors and the more adventurous learners could filter it by these categories.<\/p>\n Here’s a link to the 3rd Century Emperors<\/a> timeline we published on the course. Our only disappointment was that while it was possible to export the entries as CSV we couldn’t import the data that we (Rob) had so carefully collated. \u00a0(That gave an excuse to experiment with AutoIT keyboard macro<\/a>s, but that’s another story).<\/p>\n We can’t prove that the timelines themselves improved the overall learner experience as too many things changed. \u00a0Notably, we placed “Timeline: Life on the Northern Frontier” \u00a0in a dedicated “step” rather than tagging the time information at the end of a video. So this brought time right to the fore. \u00a0We know from the analytics that learners spend time on this new step, and we used bit.ly to track links to the interactive timeline, so we know it was viewed.<\/p>\n Learner comments implied that while some liked the interactive timelines, many of them were \u00a0even more happy with the printable pdfs<\/strong> we provided as downloadable reference links.<\/p>\n It took a few days create the interactive timelines.\u00a0Was it worth it? \u00a0My view is yes; but yet again I’m struck that the accessible pdf can be just as valuable a resource as the whizzy clicky shiny thing – I’d see them as complementary. \u00a0The most important learning point though, is if the content\/concept is important, give it the space.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We were conscious after the first run of our “Hadrian’s Wall: Life on the Roman Frontier” that many learners had struggled with time. The course covered a 400 year timespan and the thematic nature of the some elements of the course meant that we didn’t always move from 0- 400 in a linear way. So, … Continue reading “Grappling with Time”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1008,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurelearning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nualadavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nualadavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nualadavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nualadavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1008"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nualadavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nualadavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nualadavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions\/59"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nualadavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nualadavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nualadavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"timelineJS](\"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nualadavis\/files\/2016\/01\/timelineJS-Screenshot-1024x668.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"tikytoky\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nualadavis\/files\/2016\/01\/tikytoky.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n