Beyond Epistemic Isolation: A Transferable Digital Ecosystem Framework for Fostering Student Agency in Text-Centric Humanities Disciplines

Higher education in the humanities, particularly within text-centric and philological disciplines, faces an escalating epistemic crisis: traditional pedagogy, rooted in solitary reading and instructor-centric authority, increasingly fosters cognitive isolation and superficial compliance among contemporary digital learners. Addressing the urgent need to move beyond epistemic parochialism and descriptive institutional reporting, this study investigates how an integrated digital learning ecosystem—combining collaborative social annotation, digital linguistic corpora, and multimodal knowledge synthesis—reconfigures epistemic agency, peer belonging, and learning outcomes. Situated within an Eastern European public university serving as a critical revelatory case of rapid digital transition within a historically conservative curricular tradition, the research employed a concurrent triangulation mixed-methods design appraised via the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT) across 170 undergraduate students (n=88 experimental, n=82 control). Quantitative analyses revealed statistically significant, large-effect enhancements in cognitive engagement (d=2.41), learner autonomy (d=2.25), peer belonging (d=2.58), and summative academic performance (t(168)=14.85, p<0.001, d=2.27), corroborated by objective Learning Management System interaction logs showing a nine-fold increase in interactive events and a seventeen-fold increase in peer-to-peer discourse. Qualitative thematic synthesis demonstrated that the ecosystem fundamentally transforms the ontological encounter with text: asynchronous annotation acts as visible thinking that redistributes interpretive authority, while multimodal artifacts serve as authentic demonstrations of higher-order synthesis. The study conceptualises the Collaborative Textual Ecosystem (CTE) framework, providing a theoretically grounded, transferable model for modernising humanities pedagogy and safeguarding authentic student engagement in the contemporary digital era.