Ten years ago, Lévesque invented the Virtual Historian, an online library program that houses hundreds of digitized documents, photographs, newsreels and other archival materials. Instead of listening to a lecture, students can follow the timelines themselves to discover how events unfolded. Today, the bilingual site includes packaged modules about the War of 1812, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the residential schooling of Native peoples, the Halifax Explosion, the life of European Jews in Nazi Germany and more. Teachers can share lessons through social media such as Twitter.
Lévesque, the director of uOttawa’s Virtual History Lab, uses sophisticated methods such as eye-tracking analysis to study how students acquire information, helping to provide teachers with new tools to develop digital literacy skills. He says he developed the site because education literature shows that students learn and retain more when lessons are interactive.
