Heroes - Text and Hypertext: Transatlantic video-conferencing with VLE support: Innovative e-learning technologies enhancing undergraduate skill acquisition Orla Murphy and Carrie Griffin University College Cork, Ireland

Context: Why redesign an existing course?  Humanities undergraduate course  Focus on textual transmission through the ages  Collaborative  Issues raised at an international conference MBSR  Parallel issues between medieval textual scholarship and modern digital scholarship identified

Participation  English literature course theorising textual transmission from oral to print cultures  International collaboration with Prof. Martha Driver at Pace U, NY and “Beowulf to Lear: Text, Image and Hypertext”  Participation achieved via the Blackboard VLE and videoconferencing

Course Delivery  Common texts read  Groups met separately  Discussion document issued on Blackboard  Video conference held  Web page

Assessment  VLE discussion threads  Essay and presentation  Course website designed by students incorporating student content

Conclusions  An e-learning environment was created that was supportive, innovative and encouraging for the School of English  Students enhanced their digital skills within a content driven humanities environment  Creating a web page was a practical contemporary example of textual transmission, and an enhanced learning experience for students