Visual Arts Online Educational Trends

Background

Some visual arts educators acknowledge the benefits of Internet-based art courses as effective means for distributing practice-based techniques and theories to students that had been excluded in the past (Maeroff, 2003; Stewart, n.d). Yet, there are others who hesitate to migrate arts courses to the Internet, due to the impracticality of teaching hands-on techniques and concepts—ones customarily taught in a studio setting with artist-teacher demonstrations—via a distance format, synchronous or asynchronous. The use of CMC for teaching many arts techniques is challenging, because it lacks the type of art experience in which students engage directly with artistic materials, the actual artist-instructor, or an original work of art, such as a class excursion to a museum or gallery (Bastos, 2010; Knowles & Kerkman, 2007). Therefore, visual arts educators in the online environment need to assess the roles that traditional visual art pedagogies play, as they develop online curricula, and to look potential technologies to deliver visual art content in an efficient, but meaningful way.