Teaching Art History Online: Collaborative vs.

Individual Virtual Exhibition Projects | Art History Teaching Resources

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Teaching Art History Online: Collaborative vs.

Individual Virtual Exhibition Projects

Jennifer S. Pride
May 7, 2016
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I developed an online version of Art History I (Caves to

Cathedrals) in Spring 2015 and taught a single section in Fall of
the same year. I designed the course knowing that most of the
students would be studio and graphic artists, residential students
and online students from all over the country, a mix of
traditional and non-traditional, non-art-history students. With
that in mind, I posted a request for suggestions to AHTRs
Facebook page and received some interesting ideas, such as
collecting images on Pinterest, and using Google hangouts,
something my students chose to do on their own mid-way
through the project. Most of the feedback I received, however,
warned of the difficulties of online group projects. Yet, my
department required a collaborative effort. After much research I
decided to forego the traditional research paper and have my
students work in small groups to create online exhibitions. I had
used the virtual exhibition assignment previously with great
success in on-campus classes with non-majors and adult
continued education. The difference would be that instead of
using PowerPoint, my online students would use an online
program: Google Art Project, something several colleagues
suggested on my AHTR post.

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Teaching Art History Online: Collaborative vs. Individual Virtual Exhibition Projects | Art History Teaching Resources

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The students had smaller assignments due each week specific to

weekly content, but the Collaborative Exhibition Project was to
run as a unifying thread throughout the course. I envisioned my
students working together in a virtual collaborative environment
as they learned about art and produced a final project that had
more relevance to their lives as artists than a traditional research
paper. That vision was shattered in Week 2 when I was
bombarded with student emails imbued with confusion,
desperation, and anxiety about how they were supposed to work
as a group online, when everyone lived in different time zones,
and how to come up with possible themes for Step 1: Initial
Ideas. By Step 2: Theme, most students were on the right track,
though a few submitted modern and contemporary topics for
Survey I. For this step, students submitted brief statements
(approx. 100 words) describing their exhibition themes and what
types of works they anticipated including in their projects.
Step 3 asked for a list of artworks to be included in the
exhibition five works for each group member. This step
required the students to start using Google Art Project (GAP)
which brought on another onslaught of emails from confused
and frustrated students. I chose GAP because it touts the ability
to create your own member galleries and exhibitions, drawing
from their vast repository of high-definition images.
Unfortunately, the exhibition format is not user-friendly and I
had as much difficulty as my students learning how to navigate
the program. Eventually I created a step-by-step guide for using
GAP, but that meant more work for me and more reading for my
students. It is not easy asking students to master a new
technology during the course of an 8-week semester, but they
pushed forward, thankfully.

http://arthistoryteachingresources.org/2016/05/teaching-art-history-online-collaborative-vs-individual-virtual-exhibition-projects/[10/5/2016 2:08:00 PM]

Teaching Art History Online: Collaborative vs. Individual Virtual Exhibition Projects | Art History Teaching Resources

For the fourth step, students submitted short summaries or bullet

points of important information about each work of art they
chose in the previous step. The fifth step required the students to
work together to compose the introductory wall text for the
virtual exhibition. This step posed more problems for group
work than previous steps because it required students to
collaborate on writing and revision. In most groups, one student
took the initiative to write the initial draft followed by group
revisions. In Week 7, the students submitted rough drafts of
their work links to their exhibitions in GAP for which they
received substantial feedback. By Week 8 the groups completed
all editing and revisions based on my feedback and submitted
the link for their final projects. I was thrilled to see that my
students had managed to create quality exhibitions despite the
trial-and-error nature of the project. More importantly, they
appeared to have met the assignment learning outcome: to
critically analyze and synthesize art objects to curate a coherent
exhibition; comprehend the meaning of works of art and how
they functioned originally within the historical, social, religious,
cultural, and political context in which they were made; identify
correspondences between technical procedures (artists
intentions) and their purposeful communicative and cultural
functions; and master the skills of formal analysis and
description in order to analyze works of art in terms of their
content; to describe the subject matter of an image, its literary
sources, and iconographical tradition, as well as to describe the
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Teaching Art History Online: Collaborative vs. Individual Virtual Exhibition Projects | Art History Teaching Resources

formal properties of works of art, that is, to analyze composition,

technique, scale, location, and use of materials.
Along the way I made some modifications based on student
feedback. For example, I created group discussion board forums
with different discussion boards for each step of the project.
One group decided to skip Blackboard and use Google Hangouts since they could download the app on their phones rather
than having to be at home to access Blackboard on their
computers. Also, they were able to get notifications when group
members posted comments and assignments. If I were to teach
this course as an online group project in the future, I think
notifications for posts would be an essential component.
Notifications would keep students involved as the project
develops live over the course of each week, a sort of virtual
group unification. Another change I would make would be to
group my students according to time-zone since this seemed to
be the biggest hurdle students faced waiting on each other.
At the end of the semester I asked the students for projectspecific feedback for my own pedagogical research and
improvement. The remarks were unanimous: they enjoyed the
project but not as a collaborative effort. I have included a few
quotes here so we can hear the students voice more directly:
There is too much risk vs reward in having members of the
group that often do not have the same schedules and can get very
stressful when relying on group members that may not have the
time during the week to get with other students. In other words,
there are too many variables involved in the lives of online
students to have such a major group project done in this manner,
especially when it comes to the subject of art.
I think that group projects are difficult in an online environment
to begin with for any student. We all take online courses
because we have busy and odd schedules. Some only do work
on the weekends and others do their work the beginning of the
week. Finding a way to make that all gel and fit in order to work
through posts and emails is even more difficult. That being said,
there was much to gain from this project. The project let us gain
http://arthistoryteachingresources.org/2016/05/teaching-art-history-online-collaborative-vs-individual-virtual-exhibition-projects/[10/5/2016 2:08:00 PM]

Teaching Art History Online: Collaborative vs. Individual Virtual Exhibition Projects | Art History Teaching Resources

access to view art that the book and our materials did not cover.
We learned more information than the general touch base over
view a course like this is designed to cover. The course was
well designed and this added to the amount of exposure and
information we could be given. Additionally, it was a nice break
in monotony from writing papers. We are art majors here to
review and do art. Most of us are not writers and it is not
something we are looking to advance in our field, though a
necessity of the world around us. This let us merge improving
our language arts with our digital and visual arts. Something
that all art students need to keep in mind and learn to do well to
succeed in the future. I enjoyed the project and think it is a great
way to explore more within the topics we are covering in the
course.
Many online students are online students because it fits their
schedules and time constraints of their busy lives and trying to
schedule availability for group meetings and to complete
assignments with classmates in different time zones made the
project much more stressful than it needed to be.
Overall, the project was successful and I received extremely
positive feedback from students, course designers, and faculty
evaluators. Besides the issue of collaborative online work, my
biggest concern is the limited usefulness of Google Art Project.
The complex and convoluted program continues to confuse my
students, but once they figure it out, they excel academically. In
the end, I streamlined the process after the first semester to
include fewer steps and switched from group to individual based
on student concerns. I will cover the ups and downs of the
Google Art Project Virtual Exhibition assignment in a
subsequent post!

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4 RESPONSES TO TEACHING ART HISTORY ONLINE:

COLLABORATIVE VS. INDIVIDUAL VIRTUAL EXHIBITION
PROJECTS

1.Gretchen McKay says:

May 7, 2016 at 1:18 am
This is great. Since I am teaching a hybrid class this fall to my
introductory (Caves to Cathedrals) AHY class, I may use this as a great
final project (rather than exam). Thanks!
Reply

2.Cynthia hawkins says:

May 7, 2016 at 12:21 pm
Thank you for your and your students terrific effort. I would certainly use
your example here for my online courses in African American art history
survey and Museum History and Theory. I elk be passing your project
along to my museum studies colleague.
Reply

3.Roxanne says:
May 7, 2016 at 3:07 pm
I used Google Aft Project for the first time ever this semester, for my
onsite Non-Western Survey class! Each student created their own
gallery (I didnt have group projects, which I avoid due to the reasons
your students cited). Each student had to pick a culture studied in class
and a theme for their gallery. They were not allowed to use European
style art but had to use examples from their chosen cultures tradition.
They had to Reseacrch outside Google art project to find information
and references to support their Curators Statemenf (big TEXTBOX at
beginning of Google galleries) and also for their informational labels
(text boxes by each image) and cite their sources in MLA format. I had

http://arthistoryteachingresources.org/2016/05/teaching-art-history-online-collaborative-vs-individual-virtual-exhibition-projects/[10/5/2016 2:08:00 PM]

Teaching Art History Online: Collaborative vs. Individual Virtual Exhibition Projects | Art History Teaching Resources

them write informal reviews for me of the class this week (oir last
meeting): one thing they would change about the class and one thing
theyd keep. Many students cited the Google Art Gallery as something
they would want me to keep Most of them loved it! There were some
trying moments at the beginning with getting links to their galleries to
work (cant be in edit mode or link wont work, they have to remember to
make it public or link wont work, etc). Many students even stayed after
class to rave about it! A couple students wrote they would rather have
term papers which surprised me a lot, but if I ever teach the class again
I will definitely have a term paper option for those exceptions to the rule.
Pedagoglically, it was a major success. It got students looking at and
thinking about art in new ways, and enhanced their appreciation for and
understanding of non-western Art in a fun and un-intimidating way.
(Since many US undergrads are intimidated or uninterested in nonwestern art, this approach really was great!
Reply

4.S. Bauer says:

May 7, 2016 at 3:40 pm
There is a PowerPoint VT museum program out threre. I use it now. You
can find it here:
http://www.heckscher.org/downloads/ED12_EdRes_VirtualMuseum.ppt
Its not the best either but perhaps simpler than GAP.
Reply

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