Footnotes in academic elearning
Jun 24, 2014
I am working with an SME in an academic setting. We are preparing an elearning course to be part of an online Master's program. The content for this elearning course was presented to me in a "paper" complete with abundant footnotes to quoted and referenced material.
I'm looking for non-clunky ways to incorporate the footnotes as I make this paper into an interactive story. Obviously we want to acknowledge others' ideas when appropriate. The footnotes are mostly short notes like this:
1. Author, Title of Book, Publisher, 2010, 199.
2. Author, 211.
3. Author, 213.
4. Writer, Title of Article, Journal, 2013, 45.
5. Author, 225.
6. Writer, 46.
One option to make a lightbox slide of endnotes and to include actual superscript numbers in the text on the screen, with triggers to the lightbox slide. Both this option feels clunky to me.
Is anyone here working in academia where they care about footnotes? How are you incorporating these citations?
5 Replies
Why don't you use hover states for this. Make the footnote number a different colour and add a hover state to it that contains the actual footnote. When the user hovers their mouse over the number the footnote will display.
Great idea, Nancy! You could also include an expandable footnotes tab that when selected, expands up from the bottom of the screen and contains all of the footnotes.
I love this idea, Ashley. Do you have an example of this?
That's not an accessible option.