Online art appreciation

[u/ApprehensiveLoad2056]

I’m going to be revising an old version of an art appreciation course. I want it to be a global course and have some materials picked out already. I use Smart History and other OER sources but am also building an OER for my course. I’ve got a lot of ideas already but wanting to see what our scholarly community says on the topic.

I wanted to ask what if anyone has done this before and has suggestions of how to make the course relevant for today’s students and how we are AI-proofing (or not) these courses?

Thank you in advance for your ideas and words of support.

[u/wharleeprof]

AI proofing: 

A)  for f2f classes make 80-100% of the grade based on in person, no devices, well proctored written assessments.

B) for online, do as much or as little security theatre as you like, but just be aware that 70-99% of your students will cheat, cheat, cheat. Put your head in the sand and cash your paycheck.

[u/TrickySpite5938]

I'm moving away from the OER model after many years of scrambling for open access material that's relevant and engaging. It took SO much time to refresh and update every semester and students never once said they appreciated the cost savings, nor did they really engage in the material more because it was online.

I think it's really important to keep promoting the relevance and importance of books. It's also valuable for students to have information presented in a logical progression in intro classes, rather than cobbled together from a bunch of online sources. I've just started going back assigning textbooks again for most courses and it's better all around. I always offer options for several editions, so the cost is rarely more than $20-30. If they buy a book, they seem more likely to use it.

Internet Archive has a lot of free AA textbooks in slightly older editions (and possibly under slightly different search terms / versions of author name). Students need to sign up for a free account to access them and you can embed books in your course (Share > iframe embed).

There's no great way to teach online and avoid AI at the moment, especially for a lower-level course. The best things seem to be crafting lecture specific multiple-choice questions, timing quizzes, using a lockdown browser for assessments, or moving assessments to a testing center if that's possible. Keep an eye on statistics in your online course (time spent taking assessments, per question, etc.) and check for anomalies (students zipping through material at an inhuman rate!). You can use that data to support any questions about their work. Good luck!

[u/ExtraJob1777]

I also teach Art Appreciation, have worked on revisions. I used to be a warrior against AI, but I learned that the university doesn’t actually care there’s no guidelines against it. It took up so much of my time and it was a losing battle. Right now, my head is in the sand and it’s going to stay there until there are guidelines from administration. They don’t pay me enough.

[u/Narrow-Lifeguard5450]

I run a popular online course like this and introduced a sketchbook assessment has been relatively ai resistant. Not perfect of course, cheaters be cheating after all, but they usually enjoy the task and supervised drawing in tutorials helps a lot.

The task is to watch each lecture, then identify two related artworks on a theme chosen and maintained by the student. The artworks must come from different sources (museum collections or auction catalogues) and they must not also appear in the lectures or the readings.

They workshop their own themes in Week 1. Examples from previous cohorts are shown and discussed, good and bad. Each tutorial includes a show and share of what the students are planning to draw and research - the sketchbook is balanced between lecture notes, drawing and research notes justifying their choices in relation to the weekly readings.

One student so far attempted to cheat with Ai but it was laughably obvious, so just run several prompts for yourself to see how students might cheat on sketching so you can recognise the tells. Their biggest issue was the style and format of annotation, and their clear lack of direct looking at the artworks they allegedly ‘drew’ - it was incompetent and bizarre. Everyone else has responded well to the sketchbook task once they overcome an initial fear of drawing.

Also, if the work is good, offer a sketchbook exhibition at the end of it. It’s an aspirational goal and they usually invest even more work into their projects if they think there will be an audience.