My name is Andrés Mario Zervigón. The name of the course that I helped design and run, is the
History of Art from the Renaissance to today--
that's Art History 106--and it ran online
this spring.
I designed the course with a Benjamin Paul, who's a colleague of mine in the Art History
department, who teaches Renaissance art, and we have taught numerous times in the past
106 face-to-face.
We moved the course from face-to-face to online in order to accommodate a larger enrollment,
and also for students who couldn't otherwise make the face-to-face meetings.
I think online is really useful for students who have busier schedules, nontraditional
students, if you work during the day.
I had a few study abroad students who wanted to get core requirements completed while they
were abroad, and they took the online course.
I think it offers a lot more flexibility for some of the busier nontraditional students.
This class definitely requires a lot of time from our students.
There is a fair amount of reading, we do ask that they spend at least five hours on the
interactive online textbook, which not only contains readings but also contains flashcards,
videos, some guiding quiz questions that we don't actually grade, but they're there to
help them learn should they want to take advantage of that resource.
They only have to log in once and then the whole world of art history is at their fingertips.
It was very simple for them to find the discussion sections and then to participate in them,
to read the other students remarks and respond to them.
The online structure of the website was amazing;
it was very accessible,
it was very straight forward.
The menus, the videos, the captions on the videos were all really excellent.
There were a few technical issues at the very beginning of the course which is expected
at the beginning of a semester, but the IT people at the department were excellent about
resolving these issues as quickly as possible.
The students preformed very well on the midterm.
I was a but hesitant, and a little bit worried because I did not know them, I did not see
them, but their mid-terms were- were amazing.
They were obviously really grasping the subject matter independently and via discussion.
I think what I found most important about this class was to think about this online
format in its own right, and not simply translate the face to face class that we're all used
to, onto the online platform.
This is the future and for all of these students they are gonna go into a job market that's
more online and involves discussing topics that are going to be important to them in
a clear and concise way to their future colleagues
and this is great practice for them in that way.
We could not have done it alone,
because we had no awareness of how an online course is done.
No background, no knowledge, and so we needed Instructional technology to tells us
what was required, to actually put together the materials that we chose, to marshal the
design according to a calendar, to get our videos taken and put up,
and even tell us how those videos were made.
Just to get us to understand exactly what's involved in an online course,  to begin with.
I can say too that if we did not have the help of Instructional Technology we wouldn't
have done this.
