How to Succeed in Distance Art Education

Going after the right audience

Studying an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the creator of a digital game-based learning program for art education gleans ideas for a needs assessment phase. He’ll need his assessment as he gets ready to approach an art museum with his idea.

©2003 By Bill H. Ritchie

What is the “sweet spot” for on-line art education? If you study the successful on-line virtual schools you may get some ideas. It's my need to do this because I have a burning desire to help create a successful on-line art education program.

This is a challenging task. Most people agree, first of all, you can’t teach art at a distance. You have to be up close and in contact with your students—if you are a teacher—and students need each other as well as the teacher in order to learn about art and making things in art, design and crafts.

Secondly, many people are not convinced that you can teach art at all. They're certain that art is born in people, a talent, or a high calling. Besides, in today’s economy, people don’t think of art lessons as being integral to basic education. Therefore the mention of art education is going to seem out of place in a serious discussion about schools and the educational crisis that the United States is experiencing.

Put these two together and you have a formula for failure of any attempt to put forward art education at-a-distance. Nevertheless, I am obsessed with doing exactly this: Help design and produce an on-line learning scheme that schools and universities can license and use as part of their liberal arts offerings.

My reasons are personal and professional. In fact, I think the personal and professional reasons I have are exactly the source of why my proposal will succeed while comparable attempts by a traditional school faculty committee would fail.

The need is based on necessity—my own burning desire to teach, learn, do research and practice at the same time, under one roof - so to speak. It’s called parallel processing in the computer industry and concurrent sales, marketing, design and production in the manufacturing industry.

Want it? Gamify it!

This, then, is the background of my goal—to help produce and design an art education product and service based on digital games. I read publications on both the state of the industry for on-line, distance learning in academe (in books and newspapers in print and on-line).

Today, for example, on-line in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Information Technology, Volume 49, Issue 40, Page A31) I’m learning about How to Succeed in Distance Education.

The advice is: Go after the right audience.

There’s no mention of art in the article. I haven't seen references to art education on-line in the two years that I’ve been monitoring the Chronicle articles on educational technology. But if I have learned anything in my 40 years in art, it’s to look for the unexpected in unexpected areas.

On-line or distance education is largely devoted to topics in business, industry, the military and healthcare.

Art, as yet, has not reached beyond the level of industrial arts, i.e., graphic design, visual communication, illustration, and graphical user interface training. What we call “fine art” is not part of that picture.

Those successful programs are designed for:

Working professionals who want to advance their careers by taking courses part time.

Executives who travel frequently but want to earn graduate degrees.

Parents who want to finish their undergraduate work without missing their kids' Saturday soccer games.

Experts say these markets are happy with what’s already available, but they could improve if employers and employees in specific industries were addressed with stronger marketing and sales efforts. You must take care to maintain the core mission of the institution when doing this.

The institution behind it—the art school, museum, or a combined team of art-related enterprises—would have to agree on the long-term goal. Also, the people involved would have to be committed to the project; individuals would need to learn the value of the new way of reaching and teaching students.

One glaring factor I face is that art education is eclectic and not career-oriented enough. That’s why I turned to digital game-based learning as a viable option. By thinking of combining the look and feel of computer games—everything from Solitaire to Ragnarok—I can see how art education on-line can develop its own voice, its own quality and even set the stage for a host of new kinds of art experiences both on-line and in real day-to-day life.

The paradox here is that the on-line industry has targeted mostly working adults who want college experience and credit or certification. Games industries, until the last ten years, targeted children and the only rewards were points and digital badges. Some offered tangibles, such as collectible cards, flash cards, etc. for a small fee (which burgeoned into millions of dollars for the game company).

So, how, now, does one get adults interested in a game about art? You don’t even have to try. In fact, kids can’t get enough art. Rich graphics are the most important thing about games. This accounts partly for why parents have a hard time getting their kids off the game machines, and one of the few ways they can do this is by offering a hands-on art experience.

Each effort—education on-line and games—has its own sweet spot. Sweet spots are defined by challenges, such as commuting, time of day, baby-sitting, and loss of work hours. A full class load is daunting, and only flexibility works to remove this barrier.

My goal is to remove the barrier by flexibility and do it with an entertaining approach, i.e., a role playing game, a simulation or Jeopardy or Trivia approach.

So how do I begin to target my “sweet spot”?

In an example given in the Chronicle article, a university that wanted to augment its traditional offerings targeted a specific group—single working mothers who wanted a degree for career advancement—and that’s the population they got. They “mined what they already knew” said a university official, and got results they expected.

What will happen when I “mine what I know”?

After visiting a nearby museum (the Tacoma Art Museum) and watching artist Dennis Evans give a talk and present a demonstration technique in encaustic, I know a little more about the needs of the museum in their education program. Does that include “what I know”?

Did their efforts revolve around this artist's (Evans') knowledge, and did the museum and its visitors “need” to know it?

The Chronicle article is an example of my mining process. I’m looking for a way to use what I know as an on-line educator, yet not focusing only on what I know. My burning desire is to use the arts—in particular the multimedia arts—to find or aggregate communities where creativity in people is stimulated and applied to problem-solving.

The Chronicle article introduced a solution to a problem I know needs to be addressed: Teachers are not ready to teach on-line, and many can’t use technology to augment their traditional teaching because they haven’t had a chance to learn.

It’s not the technology that stands in the way. It’s the fracturing of the community. Disenfranchisement is the hazardous outcome of trying to teach on-line when, from the outset, community-aggregating was not the original goal.

Content, the traditional stock-in-trade in education, does not carry across the Internet the way it does across a room with people in it. I try to imagine the talk by Dennis Evans as an on-line event, and I get something like a game in my mind.

The key, according to Chuck Martin in The Digital Estate, is context. By changing from being a content provider I become a context provider. I provide the context, via videotape and hypermedia, of the creation and performances Dennis is about.

The game I design will start with this goal in mind: Community building. Secondly, the game would focus on user support or, more specifically, inter-user support where students help each other.

There should be general agreement from the beginning that the institutions creating the art-ed on-line programs aim to support the student in as many ways as possible. First, the institutions can do this by using a game interface instead of text or slide shows and, second, by taking a partnership stance with the student, not that of the omnipotent authority.

The article in The Chronicle was helpful to read, and encouraging to me. What I need now is to find other people in my region—the Pacific Northwest—who think that art education (beyond the "Art 100" or art appreciation courses now available) on-line is desirable and do-able.

I need to find people who are motivated to develop the idea with me, with the premises I stated above (a game interface and community development). When I have located people like this, as a team we can tell others “How to succeed in art education on-line” and provide the basic tools to get started.

This is my burning passion, my search, and the basis for the game, Emeralda.

The author depicted himself in the pose of George Washington (as seen on the 23-cent stamp) for his SIM commemorative artist stamp. Ritchie's game, Emeralda: Stamps 'N Stories, uses these "artist stamps" (known in philately as cinderella) as collectible trading pieces.

Bill H. Ritchie, Jr. is an Itinerate Professor of Art in Seattle. He taught 19 years at the UW as a professor of art, traditional printmaking and media arts. Resigning at 43 to start his own learning, research and production company, he created Emeralda in 1992, a game strategy he likens to a fantasy region accessible only by computer. He invented rules-of-play and an operating system he wants to be an online interactive game. He’s immersed himself in a virtual promised land in the age of digital reproduction.

He writes for the benefit of discipline, using a PDA when he's wandering around and a desktop PC to organize his essays. He has a thousand or more saved. You can see his blog listed on the island of RIISMA in the Emeralda Region--see Services.

For further information via e-mail: ritchie@seanet.com, and see the professional Web site at www.seanet.com/~ritchie. The company’s name is Emeralda Works, 500 Aloha #105, Seattle, WA 98109. This article’s statistics are: 1605 Words. 7863 Characters. 2 Pages. iri30609 How to Succeed in Distance Art Education. ©2003 Bill H Ritchie.