IU SBC Fellows: Good Practices

Good Practice from Benjamin C. Withers, IU South Bend

Title	Using Materials Already Existing on the Web for Art Appreciation Courses
Course or Project	Art Appreciation H100 Web-Based Teaching Platform for Art Appreciation
Audience	Beginning undergraduates
Active	Spring 2001 and still active
Background Information	Art Appreciation at IUSB in geared toward non-major students and is likely to be the only Arts course that many students will ever take. It is our best chance to promote an understanding of visual art and its processes to the public; this is especially crucial in this period in our culture where support among taxpayers and for art education in secondary schools is dwindling. The goal of this project was to utilize features of Web-based learning that would bring the best of the world's art to our students in a way geared to the particular needs and interests at the local and regional level, in effect creating our own "custom" textbook built from readily available modules.
Teaching Challenge	We faced two problems, one internal, the other external. In the first category, Art Appreciation had previously been taught as a lecture-style class with over 100 students (large for IUSB). While the students learned much, the classroom environment was not conducive to interaction and hence presented a passive learning environment. This learning environment was supported by rather static, mass-produced technology-- still slides presented on a screen, textbooks written by professional with goals in mind that never precisely paralleled our local needs. Our challenge was to use technology to allow us to write our own textbook by capturing the best of the Web. We sought to integrate moving images, information from Web sites, still images, hands-on demonstrations of such things as color theory seamlessly into the classroom and into the materials available for the students' home study. A further challenge was to design this supporting environment with a degree of flexibility that would allow the various instructors (we moved from a large format to a smaller, discussion oriented classes) to tailor the material to their own pedagogical needs without sacrificing quality (after all, we are a small faculty lacking expertise in many of the areas covered) or the overall unity of the course (even though each individual instructor approaches the material differently, we felt that a student taking one section of the course should share some experiences with one taking any of the other sections).
Good Practice	This project did not require us to develop or invent new software or software applications; instead it was an investment in the people involved in teaching the course. None of the people involved (one full-time faculty member, three associate faculty) had any extensive experience with the use of technology in the classroom. This grant provided us with the opportunity to explore how to best use material already-existing on the Web (found at sites produced by world-class experts at Metropolitan Museum, the National gallery, the French Ministry of Culture, for example) for our own common purposes. We met as a group to decide what a contemporary, well-designed Art Appreciation course should cover, what sites provided the best content, and which were likely to be around in the long-term. In essence, it was crash-course in internet content for the previously clueless. After choosing the content, we relied on the faculty and the students at Purdue Technology to design a framework for our own site on the Web which would serve as a flexible receptacle for the content we had gathered.
Impact	The result of this project is a literal explosion of the use of technology in Art Appreciation and Art History Classrooms. The money and exposure provided by the grant provided us leverage with the administration to create, for the first time, a classroom geared toward the specific need of art history. We now have four sections of Art Appreciation and two of upper-level art history where technology plays a key role in the instructional process. The room and its equipment is also being put to use by instructors in other areas that require high-end visual technology such as Communication and Film Studies. The pedagogical impact on art history and art appreciation has been enormous. Instead of telling our stories through a succession of static images, we access Web-sites that provide 360-degree panoramas of buildings, virtual tours through archeological sites, and detailed, interactive presentations of paintings. These sites, as well as class assignments and essays based on them, are brought together on our site. This allows ready access for the instructors in the classroom and for the students in home study. The participants in this study have gone on to receive curriculum development grants from IUSB which will allow us to expand our own "home-grown" content.

Keywords	Accessibility, visualizing concepts, course syllabi
Technical Format	Customized Web site

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