Art History 310 - Art History in the Context of Classical Civilizations
Luke Skywalker was recently hired to teach Art History at NYU. In his previous job he used Blackboard to create an online environment but was dissatisfied by it so has decided to participate in NYU's Sakai pilot and has begun setting up his course there.
Luke is teaching a small, cross-listed course. Enrollment is limited to sophomore and junior Art History and Classics majors. The focus of the course is on interpretation of art work in the context of classical civilization.
He is concerned about building a curriculum that blurs the distinction between different types of data. He would like to use his course environment to appeal to different learning styles from haptic learners who like to click the mouse and require lots of hands-on interaction, to visual learners, to more traditional text based learners.
The focus of the course is on interpretation of art work in the context of classical civilization. Luke finds regular textbooks provide too much commentary so he would like to develop his own coursepack using a variety of content modalities?
Pedagogical challenges to address in the online environment:
- Cross-listed course
- Does the instructor want the material in the courses to be the same, or should it be exactly the same? What are the technical challenges with actually merging two different courses into one instance? Could it be handled using groups?
- Desire to appeal to different learning styles
- Support for podcasts, webcasts, different tracks for the different learning styles in the Melete modules
- Students need to review and evaluate visual and textual data
- Use the gallery tool
- Use Resources
- Use conditional release to keep students from moving on to other assignments until they've successfully completed the previous ones
- We would need group assignments in Sakai, or could create project site for each group...may need a way to create sub-sites
- Students need to have access to artifacts or images of artifacts
- Use the web content tool
- There are several students with visual disabilities enrolled in the course
- Use Fluid's drag-and-drop module to start, but there is more work in the gallery tool and other tools to make it accessible
- Ensure alt text is generated for each image
- Evaluate all the tools in the site for accessibility
- Group students with visual acuity with those who don't, so that sighted users have to describe images to others
Design the course using Sakai Tools: Those that are possible and those that aren't
We started by looking at the learning outcomes and then decided what tools would best achieve it.
Learning Outcomes:
- Content understanding of art
- Relay themes about art
- Understanding of how art and civilization influence each other.
Resources section to put up the images/artifacts.
Quizzes to see if they understand the images.
Assignment to integrate/differentiate the knowledge that they have learned.
There needs to be a library of images that we put into our course or link from our course.
From the image gallery, you could develop quizzes and allow for self assessment.
Allow students to develop their own portfolio of images making it thematic.
Allow for social tagging on the content (images) directly.
How do you use Sakai to manage the process since so many things are already on the internet.
What could we use in Sakai?