MyDante
Guiding learners through a contemplative reading experience
SUMMARY
I created learning content for MyDante, a contemplative reading application a small team of us designed and brought to life.
MY ROLE
Educational Content Design
UX Writing
Project Management
Learning Experience Design (collaborative)
TOOLS
Google Suite
edX
Django (content entry)
VIEW THE PROJECT LIVE
MyDante is available but not actively maintained.
DISCOVERY PHASE
Capturing project goals and vision
Our organization had been working with Professor Frank Ambrosio for several years on his creative vision—a platform for reading Dante's Divine Comedy contemplatively. The platform, MyDante, should be based on all the things we know about that medieval reading tradition, adapted to reading on a screen. It should also be visually striking and immersive.
Professor Ambrosio wanted to make this platform available as widely as possible. We decided to release the MyDante platform as the primary learning environment of a new Georgetown massive open online course (MOOC), Dante’s Journey to Freedom.
Segment of an illustration for Canto 5 of Inferno, “The Lover’s Whirlwind,” in Dante’s Divine Comedy (c. 1824) by William Blake
RESEARCH PHASE
Diving into a medieval tradition
Contemplative reading is a specific reading approach with a long history. Practiced especially in medieval religious communities in western Europe, it involved being present with a text—reading, reflecting, rereading, and often creating annotations in the margins. Professor Ambrosio, a Dante scholar, wanted to help students experience Dante's epic poem in this way.
Learning all about the history of contemplative reading would not be enough, though. We were setting out to create a digital application that users would interact with on a screen. It was also critical for us to understand how people read online. The reading experience of MyDante would be digitally mediated, and we couldn’t just provision for each contemplative reading act and call it a day. We'd need to adapt each act as something done in a digital world.
A graduate student whom I supervised and I later coauthored an article about the tradition and context of contemplative reading. 👇
IDEATION PHASE
Scoping the MyDante project
Dreaming up the details of this project was incredibly fun. Our core internal team included an instructional designer, platform developer, product manager, graphic designer, and two videographers, as well as me (wearing several hats). We worked very closely with Professor Ambrosio, who had spent many years refining how he taught contemplative reading. Every meeting was a whirl of perspectives on pedagogy, technical feasibility, and conceptual possibilities.
We started to sketch out contours of the thing we were building: it would have four reading modes, inviting users to read each canto several times. (Those modes were core, and something we emphasized in the MOOC syllabus.) Users could annotate the text, read others' annotations, keep a journal, and explore a library of Dante-inspired art. We’d link up the MyDante platform with edX via an API, allowing learners to get an edX certificate for their work on the MyDante platform.
A curriculum would wrap the platform in a structured learning experience. I'd be responsible for crafting the text introducing students to, and guiding them out of, each assigned activity. I'd also develop assessment questions and user-facing platform documentation. Since I would be playing the role of an SME as well as a content designer, I dove headfirst into the Comedy and brushed up on my critical reading theory from grad school.
“Learning to read poetry is learning to do the deep magic of language.”
DEVELOPMENT PHASE
Bringing it all to life
Once we locked down our core feature list, we hunkered down for 6 months to build the platform and develop the curriculum. And there was no wiggle-room—we had committed to a launch date, and we had thousands of learners registered for the course. I focused my energy in a few places:
Educational Content Design
I wrote over 200 critical reading questions and answer explanations for the 3 books of the Comedy. These questions mapped back to a key learning outcome for the course: explaining the interpretive significance of the poem’s events. While writing, I took into account common cognitive biases around test-taking (and test-making!) that might mislead learners. For example, I randomized the placement of correct answers across all the questions to avoid a dominant answer position.
Project Management
Our timeline was tight for a project of this size, given our many other faculty support commitments. My colleague managed the technical product development, while I managed the rest—overall project milestones, design, video production, copyright release acquisition, content development, content build, quality assurance, user-facing documentation, and partner management with edX.
Technical / UX Writing
When users landed on the dashboard, we had to greet them with something—what would we say? And how would we explain what a feature was meant to help users do? I wrote much of the text meant to help users wayfind and understand what they were seeing.
LAUNCH
Playing Virgil
The MyDante platform, along with curricular materials for Inferno, launched with over 11,000 learners enrolled. This was during the early days of MOOCs, so self-paced functionality wasn't available yet. That meant that the course was only live for 8 weeks, and we were really responsive on the discussion board.
Guiding students through the course was so rewarding. Affirmation and thanks appeared regularly in our project inbox. ✨
“These first two modules combined have brought me closer to any text than I have ever been. ”
“We have been changed in some way or other and that is something the staff of this course has to know. And be proud of their job. Thanks from my heart.”
EVALUATION AND ITERATION
How the course has lived on
That first 8-week run of Inferno was just the beginning. We followed up with launches of Purgatorio and Paradiso, then a rerun of all 3 courses, and a few years later with some major updates to the platform and concept. Based on learner feedback, we combined all 3 courses into one mega-sized course and ramped up our clarity on how users could use the platform to build their own learning journey. The course is still live, but in the interest of sustainability, it is now fully self-paced, and we encourage peer-to-peer mentorship.
Here is a chart representing cumulative course enrollments. It shows how widely the MyDante MOOC courses continue to reach—nearly 50,000 learners have enrolled in the course.