Creating e-learning History of Art courses in Higher Education

Abstract

In the last years the number of technological tools and devices at the disposal of art historians is constantly increased. New technologies are changing the way art history is taught or, at least, they have the potentiality to do it. Many of the experiences carried out until now simply replace the face-to-face lecture with online materials or combine in-class experiences with online materials or activities (for instance forums to answer questions submitted electronically or to have seminar-style discussions with small group of students). A most powerful way to use technologies to teach art history is to use them to engage students in new activities and to facilitate them in taking control of their learning. In order to achieve this goals it could also be useful to take advantages of the potentialities related with mobile devices as delivery tools and with game based teaching approaches as methodology. This paper aims to identify the most used methodologies to teach History of Art in higher Education and, based on these considerations, to propose a model to design History of Art e-learning courses for University. The field testing of this model will be done as part of a doctoral research described at the end of this paper.