MoMA Courses Online: Research and Experience
Abstract
In October 2010, Digital Learning collaborated with Adult & Academic programs in the Education department to launch MoMA Courses Online. Our initial offering was two ten-week, asynchronous online courses adapted from successful on-site MoMA Courses. On-site MoMA Course offerings are typically taught by an art historian, art critic, or graduate student to a class of 15-30 students for 5 to 10 week sessions of 1-3 hours of class a week, with many trips during class to the MoMA galleries after-hours to experience and discuss the works of art. The courses are unaccredited, with students citing access to MoMA’s collection as one of the main reasons they take the course at MoMA as opposed to a college or university. However, in thinking about translating the experience of a MoMA face-to-face course to a digital classroom, we only had the expertise and knowledge of higher-education distance learning programs to look to for guidance, as very few museums offer online courses to date, and no one has done extensive research on museum strategies of object-based learning in an online environment.
We chose two different courses to begin - a more traditional survey of art history course, Modern Art, 1880-1945, and a studio course, Materials and Techniques in Postwar Abstract Painting. These two courses offer adults around the world the unique opportunity to study modern and contemporary art using MoMA’s collection. The studio course is clearly the more unusual course to offer in an online environment. It engages students with the experience of postwar abstract painting through the lens of the artists’ technique and includes hands-on assignments where students create and share their own works of art in the style of a different artist each week. Each course had two sections of 30 students, totally 120 online students in the first semester, and will continue to expand as we analyze the appropriate student to instructor ratio. The courses are asynchronous, but highly interactive and social, with significant teacher-presence. Our greatest challenge was to provide an online experience that would be as good (if different) as being in MoMA’s galleries. Our solution was to create high-quality video produced on-site in the MoMA galleries, combined with art history slide lectures, and, in the case of the studio course, videos of studio demonstrations. Students engaged in discussions every week of the 10 week course and the instructor closely monitored and engaged the students, just like a face-to-face course. We have found teacher presence in an online learning environment to be a strong factor in developing a successful course. We are extensively evaluating the online courses to develop critical research on museum-offered online courses and will present our findings to date.