Maryland Center for History and Culture Case Study
Company Overview
The Maryland Center for History and Culture is Maryland’s premier historical organization that collects, preserves and interprets the history, art, and culture of Maryland.
The Case: Changing Perspectives
In tandem with a multi-year effort to rebrand, this statewide historical society partnered with CourseArc to build upon its vision and mission to be not just a place that preserves history, but a place for engagement of activity and learning.
Challenges
The Maryland Center for History and Culture (formerly the Maryland Historical Society) was rebranding themselves as not just a historical organization, but a nationally-recognized organization for discovery and a deeper understanding of the nation’s history and culture through the lens of Maryland. As part of their rebranding objective, the organization was looking to ramp up their educational partnership programs. A rebrand is more than changing a logo, and the Center knew it needed to find a partner that could help them create engaging, interactive and immersive programming that educators could easily use and access. They needed a partner that could help them showcase their capabilities and also provide effective data tracking for reporting for fundraising goals.
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The Maryland Center for History and Culture’s Historical Investigative Portal takes students through a journey of interactive lessons about the history of Maryland, fortifying their reading and critical thinking skills.
A rebrand is more than changing a logo, and the Center knew it needed to find a partner that could help them create engaging, interactive and immersive programming that educators could easily use and access. They needed a partner that could help them showcase their capabilities and also provide effective data tracking for reporting for fundraising goals.
Outcome
Using CourseArc, the Maryland Center for History and Culture was able to develop programming for their Historical Investigative Portal. Through CourseArc’s LTI, the program seamlessly integrated within the LMS that educators were already using. The Center’s goal was to partner with all 24 school districts within the state of Maryland to include their historical programming in the school curriculum. They are now partners with 19 of the 24 school districts and are working with private institutions as well.
In 2018, they started with 54 students across 8 classes of students and now have reached 13,612 unique students across 1,203 classes. That’s an over 25,000% increase of students accessing content in the state of Maryland since 2018.
These students have accessed over 440,000 pages of content with an average of 232 daily hits on the Center’s investigative portal, and they have completed 84,419 interactives. There are even more students accessing the content publicly without logging in.
CourseArc’s ease of use allows individual schools or teachers to link to the Historical Investigative Portal lessons directly through their Learning Management Systems (LMS) or other digital resource platforms using either public or LTI links. CourseArc’s LTI integration allows instructors to access a dashboard and track student completion progress and activity performance. Instructors can also choose to use the grade passback feature to push grades to their class gradebook.
The Maryland Center for History and Culture provides lessons for grades four, five and eight through twelve. Lessons cover Maryland and United States history, and fortifies reading, writing and thinking skills.
