This paper will outline a text-based teaching strategy for culture courses and in particular will examine the contribution that ’in-text’ questions can make towards generating ’deep approaches’ to learning when they are used in a collaborative setting. A course in the history of literature and the cultural context of that literature’s reception can often involve one-way communication and a significant amount of verbatim learning. The memorisation of authors’ names, the titles and dates of works, as well as the process of categorisation (placing those works in periods or genres) are activities that reward surface approaches to learning but which are deemed a necessary evil, even by the most pedagogically-minded instructors. The purpose of this project has been to move away from such methods. In implementing this model for text-based, collaborative learning, we asked ourselves two things: First, could the use of carefully formulated in-text questions in a student-oriented, interactive setting encourage a deep, rather than a surface approach to learning, and second, could such a course help to solve the budget-versus-quality dilemma created by the steadily decreasing number of contact hours teachers are permitted to schedule, while still maintaining high educational standards.