Promoting active engagement with text-based resources in large first-year modules in History

In large courses it can be particularly challenging to engage students in active reading practices. The shift over the last decade to the use of digital sources and during the pandemic, the adoption of online teaching has further exacerbated the problem. In this paper, we discuss our strategies for engaging large classes (150-250 students) in active reading through use of Talis Elevate, a social annotation tool. We outline two case studies in which we used social annotation and observed a significant increase in student engagement. We propose a new concept, ‘active online reading’, which combines structured individual commenting tasks with responding to other students’ annotations to enhance learning. This concept has relevance not only in our reading-rich discipline of History but also across higher education more generally.