For the past few weeks I have been working on building out the Smithsonian Summer Session course that will run from June 27th through July 1st, 2022. I have been working on the non-public facing side of Edx which is called Edx Studio Edge and this portion of the project involves a bit of creative problem solving. The different Smithsonian Units have representatives that meet every other Friday to discuss how the course will look and how they wish it to run. I sit in on these meetings and take notes and provide support on the technical side of how the course will run. I have built out the course registration page and will be sending it around for the representatives from the different Smithsonian Units to approve or offer feedback. Once I have received feedback, I will go into the course and make the appropriate changes based on the feedback received. Sometimes there is a specific aspect they want included and it has been my job, with my advisor, to figure out how to make that possible for the course.

This internship project draws on some of the skills I have learned in my digital humanities courses and I have learned some new skills. I remember learning basic HTML coding in the Introduction to Digital Humanities class, which I am using for building out this project. Although I will say that there is a bit more trial and error in the actual practice. In theory, when implementing code it should work perfectly each time as long as you have typed in the right code. In practice, HTML code can be a tricky and sometimes even when the code is correct it does not achieve the desired effect. There are times too when the code is actually entered incorrectly and for some reason it works, even though it should not.

More of a soft skill I learned from my coursework, collaboration between different organizations and people has been in use for this internship project. In theory, collaboration is usually a great way to combine ideas and achieve something that would not be possible without the working of minds together. In practice, I believe that this is the same! New ideas are born out of every time all the units gather for a meeting and ideas are improved upon. It is amazing to actually see productive collaboration happening in real time to create a course that will bring together educators from around the country.