Remote Teaching Resources for Studio Art and Art History
NOTE: This page is being built as we accumulate tips and resources that we think will be helpful to anyone in the department who will be teaching remotely. We are trying to put studio art and art history specific items here. Please go to https://keepteaching.unc.edu/ for UNC-Chapel Hill-wide resources.
Tips for teaching studio art using alternative/online resources:
- Modifying projects in a way that teaches critical thinking skills in the space and with the materials that are on-hand for students at home. This may mean that projects are highly experimental and include options for sound, video, and photo that may not typically be part of some studio course projects that are more material-specific. Limitations in materials and facilities can be opportunities to think more critically about making and more theoretically about a discipline. For ceramics, for example, I’d ask students to engage with existing vessels in their space and analyze their forms or to make vessels out of whatever materials they have in a very provisional way.
- Utilize online forums and assign additional readings and require written reading responses. Forums can also be used to post photos of work and require students to respond with critical feedback to make up for the lack of in-person critiques
- I’ve had a lot of success with online chats through google hangouts. Faculty would simply schedule these for certain times and require students to attend them all or a certain number.
- Social media can be used to require a certain number of posts on a class Instagram, for example. Project prompts can be written to be collaborative in an online format if students are required to keep up with one another’s work and respond to it online.
- My students have found videos to be very helpful, both for technical and conceptual lessons. Finding existing videos on Youtube can be helpful, or making videos with demos appropriate to the assignments are always possible.
Record a PowerPoint slide show with narrations and timings:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/record-a-slide-show-with-narration-and-slide-timings-0b9502c6-5f6c-40ae-b1e7-e47d8741161c (NOTE: You can also get to the Record Slide Show button from the Slide Show tab on the Powerpoint menubar).
Within PowerPoint, you can record lecture narration, ask PowerPoint to create closed captioning automatically, edit each slide’s audio and captions individually, and save the whole as either a PowerPoint or Video file.
Tips from Anne Swartz (Art Historian at SCAD) for moving a class online and associated open-access resources:
http://anneswartzblog.org/teaching
Tips from Rice University on Inclusion, Equity, and Access While Teaching Remotely:
https://cte.rice.edu/blogarchive/2020/3/13/inclusion-equity-and-access-while-teaching-remotely
Tips from U Chicago VRC for Teaching Remotely:
Cookbook of Remote and Hybrid Instructional Strategies in Art History
Notes on Teaching Remotely in Art History
Hyperallergic: Teaching Art Online Under Covid-19
These can be used to provide videos, readings, alternate assignments, and so on.
Chronicle of Higher Ed: Teaching During Coronavirus: This pdf is a compilation of many of the articles the Chronicle has been putting out since universities began moving classes online. This is a good starter kit for going online fast and also contains hyperlinks to other resources.
https://mymodernmet.com/adobe-covid-19-distance-learning-free/: Adobe is making Creative Cloud free through May 31. Although UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated individuals already have access to Creative Cloud, you can share this with other colleagues and students who do not benefit from that affiliation.
Apollo Magazine has put together a list of Open access image libraries that can be used to find images for research, teaching, course assignments, and much more!
http://arthistoryteachingresources.org/: Art History Teaching Resources has many different kinds of pedagogical resources, lesson plans, and a regular blog (the next blog post on March 12 will focus on teaching online in the time of COVID-19). They also are very active on Twitter (you can see their feed on the right side of the page) and have an open Facebook group that you can join, where much information has been shared recently about teaching online (https://www.facebook.com/groups/arthistoryteachingresources). Studio instructors and faculty are also active in this group and some of the information can be relevant to studio teaching. You can start with Distance Learning: A Brief Tutorial.
http://arthistorysurvey.com/wiki/HomePage: Wiki with Art History Open Educational Resources, organized thematically (Renaissance, Modernism, etc.). Meant to provide survey level online snippets and articles as a supplement to Stokstad and other survey texts.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19bykI9yRsQOUFcNu27h4I4fl3-0Vg9Quua_YNzC9bxs/edit#heading=h.xg5el33j7y77: Art Libraries Online Resources is a crowdsourced Google doc from Art Libraries everywhere with a varied, well-organized collection of resources for artists, teachers, researchers, and librarians. It is being updated in real time.
https://www.theartstory.org/: The Art Story is a new encyclopedic resource featuring articles, timelines, and curated collections. While it aims to be comprehensive in its coverage of art over time, its strengths are currently in modern and contemporary art.
https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/: Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities is a curated collection of reusable resources for teaching and research. Organized by keyword, each annotated artifact can be saved, shared, and downloaded. You can read DigiPed like a manuscript, or use it as a platform to create your own collections of digital resources.
https://artsandculture.google.com/: Google Arts and Culture has Street View virtual museum tours, an app where you can match your selfie to a historic portrait or match the color palette of your picture to the color palette of hundreds of other artworks, and featured thematic virtual exhibitions.
https://www.jsc.art/: The Julia Stoschek Collection has made 80 pieces of video art available online and is digitizing and uploading many more over time. The collection represents the work of over 282 contemporary time-based artists.
http://mcn.edu/a-guide-to-virtual-museum-resources/: MuseumCN’s list of virtual museum resources, e-learning, and online collections. Constantly updating.
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/: The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Timeline of Art History has essays on subjects searchable by time, geographic location, or thematic category. While focused on objects within the Met’s own collection, the essays do provide a broader art historical context for understanding those objects and containing links to further reading.
https://www.nga.gov/blog/swept-drawings.html: New art is being made and posted online specifically in relation to the pandemic. For your next syllabus, start collecting pandemic pieces like Andy Goldsworthy’s Swept Drawings for the National Gallery of Art.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2872732516116624/: Public Facebook group “Online Art & Design Studio Instruction in the Age of ‘Social Distancing'”. Ask to join.
http://www.openartsarchive.org/open-arts-objects: Open Arts Archive has a listing of films that are helpful for teaching art history. These are based around British A-level preparation but have many useful videos for anyone teaching Early Modern, Modern, or Contemporary Art.
https://smarthistory.org/: Smarthistory has many articles, videos, and links to image resources on a wide array of art historical subjects. Each article also often has links to supplementary reading and resources. Mostly aimed at high school AP-level courses, but the videos are pretty well-made mini-lectures with footage of the actual objects in situ. I recently sent my students here to get a nicely encapsulated summary of the dispute between Britain and Greece over the Elgin Marbles.
https://smartify.org/: The phone app Smartify has made all of its museum and gallery audio tours free, including new tours for exhibitions whose openings have been canceled or postponed. They cover 120 different institutions.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o9U5yTjRvRDBf9b_Ppx9F7U4RbWpoEdRRw1USRRmdv8/edit?usp=sharing: VCUArts are developing a google doc resource for multimedia instruction, being edited and updated constantly. Especially useful for Studio Art (how to do critiques, online tutorials and custom exercises, digital tools, and sample lesson plans). Proceed carefully with the doc, as it seems they have shared a link that allows editing and you don’t want to accidentally erase their very valuable suggestions!
On various social media: Follow the hashtag #museumsfromhome or #museumathome, a global museum initiative to share virtual tours of their collections online. Some are livestreaming at specific times. Others are posting pre-recorded videos.
Two Textbook Providers are opening access to e-book versions of textbooks to faculty and staff and students at UNC:
RedShelf and VitalSource have opened access to hundreds of textbooks for free to faculty and staff at certain qualifying colleges and universities impacted by the current crisis. Users can create free accounts and borrow 7 items from each through May 25.
As of 9 am on 3/18, these are the textbooks we use that are available through these two providers.
RedShelf
https://www.about.redshelf.com/redshelfresponds
Stokstad Art History
Practices of Looking
The Aztecs
Culture of Design
Art History: The Basics
Ways of Seeing
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VitalSource
https://get.vitalsource.com/vitalsource-helps
Stokstad Art History
Practices of Looking
Designing Pleasurable Products