Jonathan Friedman’s class at West Chester University in Pennsylvania is nearly finished with the culminating project of their study of the Holocaust in film: a documentary they constructed in IWitness.

Friedman, who is currently Professor and Director of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at West Chester University, first learned of IWitness at the Association for Holocaust Organizations (AHO)’s annual conference in January 2015 at USC. He also served as a consulting historian at USC Shoah Foundation, then-titled Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, from 1997-2000.

Friedman turned to IWitness to include an interactive and creative assessment in his undergraduate course “Holocaust in Film.” The entire class of 12 students worked together to produce a short documentary of testimony clips from IWitness. They decided on the theme “Narratives of Suffering and Death During the Holocaust” and each worked on different topics, such as starvation and disease in the ghettos and life and death in the concentration camps. Each student found relevant testimony clips on their individual topics in IWitness.

After compiling everyone’s testimony clips, they added text and edited the video in IWitness. They hope to publish the completed video next week.

Working with testimony had a profound effect on his students, Friedman said.

“The students found consulting the testimonies a very emotional experience,” he said. “I believe they learned more from hearing first hand accounts, seeing actual survivors, and being engaged in constructing a historical narrative in a creative format.”

Friedman plans to incorporate IWitness into his other course on the Holocaust. He assigns the students a project to develop a proposal for a Holocaust museum and will now add an additional component to the assignment – to include clips from IWitness.

“I think the site is powerful both pedagogically and morally; it develops learning on a number of levels, and it personalizes and humanizes the experience of survivors for students,” Friedman said. “Holocaust educators should try to incorporate IWitness into their lesson plans in whatever way they can.”