Natural History Illustration MOOC

               
This summer I have taken part in an interesting MOOC; Drawing Nature, Science and Culture: Natural History Illustration arranged by the University of Newcastle, in Australia and EdX. It has been very interesting to explore my personal interest in nature through observational drawing and at the same time learn more about Natural History Illustration. This course has very little to do with artistic expression but mainly to draw realistically whats in front of You through the concepts of composition, form, structure and motion.

The MOOC (Massiv Open Online Course) in it self is an interesting way to how one can organise education in the future of the digital age. This particular course had over 7000 participants (12 000 before this one) from all over the world.

What is characteristic of this way of teaching online is condensed introductions, the intense interaction between students and the use of the vast amount of resources made possible by the social media. I can see that in a near future one of the teachers main tasks will be to facilitate online teaching in different forms and making it possible for students to work independently, sharing their work and follow students in social media. Paradoxically, this way of teaching will save time and possibly supervise the students and their progress even more efficiently.

This MOOC was organised over 6 weeks with 6 sub-modules, each with several drawing assignments. Some were just homework published and commented by fellow students, others were formal peers - evaluated assignments that would be graded. There were also quizzes and other tasks to be solved through the course and recommended time used on the course was 6 hours per week. This is the sub-modules for week 2.

The main task in Natural History Illustration is, in general, to draw accurate and realistic. A lot of praise was given to these ”accurate” drawings and rightly so but there are some paradoxes here known to everybody who has studied nature and in the field tried to identify different species. What kind of bird or flower is that? A hard look, then searching in the field guide and at the specimen again. I know, I  will be able to accurately  render this bird or flower and I could even make it beautiful, but it would be worthless as a Natural History Illustration. The simple reason is that it is  not enough that it is realistic and beautiful if the drawing lacks the experience to make the necessary distinctions between species, age, sex or geographical variations. This is the reason why a photograph lacks the power of a good Natural History Illustration. 

A drawing of a bird has to have the right proportions, characteristic positions, movement displaying a strong contour together, with a striking visual pattern and colours. In the field, one will often encounter brief sightings, difficult weather and light conditions that make it possible to observe traces of the contour, colour and proportions.

The course has a very good pedagogical approach beginning with fundamental drawing skills, understanding the fundamental means of expression, "tricks of the trade” to a final exam with a full rendering.

The first week was mainly an introduction to the course, how it is organised and to what Natural History Illustrations is. Our first homework was to find a local practitioner or someone who has links your place in the world. These were presented on a discussion forum and discussed among the other participants in the course. I choose the able Norwegian wildlife artist Viggo Ree that live not so fare from where I live.

The second week our task was Observational Drawing. The lessons were several introductions videos, text material and our homework was to upload a landscape drawing. To our help, we had a hint sheet we could download. 

The drawing assignment for the second week was to draw a natural object. I made a geological excursion in the fantastic surroundings of Slemmestad and made geological sketches and looking for trilobites. 

The third week was devoted to fieldwork and keeping a Field Journal. The main exercises this week was to collect some photos of flowers we should work with later in the course and the homework was to make some Field Sketches. I drew my cats Lilly and Jussi.

The fourth week the topic was to understand the botanical structure and the homework were to draw a leaf. At the same time, it was time for the first peer-assessed submission.

The assessment drawing was to produce a structurally accurate rendering of a flower and my choice was a Malva sp. that grows just outside my studio.

The fifth week was very much the same as the week before but instead of botanical studies, we should in depth work with the anatomical structure of animals. 

And after looking at several videos and reading on how to capture the structure we should make some analytic sketches and the second homework was to draw a "structural drawing" of a bird. 

The final week was the exam and in a way sums up and repeat all the previous stages of the course. The homework was to build form and to capture the underplaying structure. This analytic drawing was supposed to be done before the final drawing assessment and again I used my cat Jussi as a model.

And for the final drawing that was assessed by five of my peers in the course, I continued to work with my horse studies from the week before. Finally, we finished with a multiple-choice exam on the theory for the whole MOOC.

This was an interesting course that I can recommend for everyone who is interested in scientific illustration and how to organise a MOOC in art and illustration. I am sure that this way of teaching will be a part of future in Art education.

https://www.edx.org/course/drawing-nature-science-culture-natural-newcastlex-nhi101x-0

Check out this promotion video on Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_awstFDN16Y

          

Peer-graded Assigment 2: Design an online Learning Componment (4)

This is the final peer-graded assignment in a MOOC  -  Learning to Teach Online by University of New South Wales, Australia.

Hello, and thanks for looking into my submission!
The task  was to design and describe the online component for your own class that you identified earlier in the course. Building on my experience with teaching Interaction of Color on iPad on Einar Granum Vocational Artschool in Oslo, Norway I developed an online course using the application developed by Yale University press in 2013.

Assignment Questions
Drawing upon the concepts explored in the course, the case studies presented, resources, activities, and discussions include responses to the following in this final culminating assessment:

1. A description of the online activity, assessment or resource including specifics about what the students and the teacher would have to do.
2. A description of how the online activity, assessment, or resource is aligned with the rest of the curriculum in your course.
3. Discuss of strategies you have chose to engage your students with the online the online teaching. 
4. Make a plan for evaluating your online assessment, activity, or resource to determine its effectiveness. 

This is nothing that I´m especially proud of; poor video and bad english. These facts shall not reflect the potential I believe  one can find in new technology and online teaching. Please look at this assignment as a trail with a lot of errors and please do not feel obliged to listen to the bitter end!

Sincerely Rustan

Transcript: Peer-graded Assigment 2: Design an online Learning Componment (4)

A plan for evaluating your online assessment….

The most important thing when evaluating teaching is to remember the goals one wants to achieve. The goals for this course in Interaction of Color are threefold. First of all, a high participation is imperative since this is essentially a practical course. Only by solving the exercises is it possible to be experience the core of what the course is al about. Secondly the students shall learn to use adequate terminology to describe different qualities in colour both scientifically and aesthetically. And the final goal is to develop the student's ability to perceive shades, nuances in colour and it´s relativity. It is important that the students understand this progression from the start.

And to achieve this, it is important to follow and evaluate the activity immediately, and to monitor to what extent students interact with each other's work. It may be a good idea that the some exercises have obligatory comment of at least 3 peers. When following uploads of the various exercises in the OER, it's important that everyone publishes and gives feedback. If someone falls outside, it is important to contact him or her and clarify why they did not participate and offer support. In short, initially what you need is a quantitative collection of data, how far, how much and how often, to ensure a great activity. Besides visiting the group first hand the various OER offer statistics that measure the activity on the given page. There you can follow the activity on the page, the number of visits, something that can be an interesting tool. Furthermore, it is important that you evaluate how the students interact with the course content, how many exercises they do and to what extent they have understood the task in hand. This can only be done by looking at the students' work and highlighting some of the most striking results presented.  The first task simply expressed is to get 3 colours to look like 4. Here the learning is to experience how some colours are more likely to change than others and more precisely how colour and value determine to what degree one will succeed. It is also important that they read the course literature so that they understand the terms used to describe the different qualities in colour. This can be evaluated by following the commentaries.

The course ends with a joint review where each student present a striking result from the course uploaded to our school LMS together with reflextion notes.

Peer-graded Assigment 2: Design an online Learning Componment (3)

This is the final peer-graded assignment in a MOOC  -  Learning to Teach Online by University of New South Wales, Australia.

Hello, and thanks for looking into my submission!
The task  was to design and describe the online component for your own class that you identified earlier in the course. Building on my experience with teaching Interaction of Color on iPad on Einar Granum Vocational Artschool in Oslo, Norway I developed an online course using the application developed by Yale University press in 2013.

Assignment Questions
Drawing upon the concepts explored in the course, the case studies presented, resources, activities, and discussions include responses to the following in this final culminating assessment:

1. A description of the online activity, assessment or resource including specifics about what the students and the teacher would have to do.
2. A description of how the online activity, assessment, or resource is aligned with the rest of the curriculum in your course.
3. Discuss of strategies you have chose to engage your students with the online the online teaching. 
4. Make a plan for evaluating your online assessment, activity, or resource to determine its effectiveness. 

This is nothing that I´m especially proud of; poor video and bad english. These facts shall not reflect the potential I believe  one can find in new technology and online teaching. Please look at this assignment as a trail with a lot of errors and please do not feel obliged to listen to the bitter end!

Sincerely Rustan

Transcript: Peer-graded Assigment 2: Design an online Learning Componment (3)

How to engage the students?

In regards to the student engagement, I have noticed in recent years after been teaching a number of courses with different applications on the iPad that students concentrate surprisingly well in comparison to traditional art education. This is especially true when I have been teaching Interaction of Color with the iPad, compared with a traditional course. I do not know if this is good or bad, and I really can´t explain why the concentration increases as they take this new technology in use. One reason can be that technology today so integrated into the student’s everyday life… just as my generation needs to have pen and paper at hand to think. Another reason can be that the technology offers less resistance, avoiding the laborious work of cutting out exact shapes, precisly mounted resulting in a beautiful artework. Another reason can be that the technology offers less resistance, avoiding the laborious work of cutting out exact shapes, precisly mounted resulting in a beautiful artework. After the introduction, they start work on of the school's iPads. The presentation of the application structure often takes only a few minutes. It takes a bit longer to set up an email account so that they can communicate with friends, classmates and different social media. In my experience it is important that each student has access to Internet before they start working. But this no problem, it works quite well and the students often help each other. Once this is done, invite each student to a Facebook group where their work is published. At the same time, students are asked to create a Pinterest account, if they do not already have one, with a pin board called Interaction of Color application. You can easily link to this Pin board on Facebook, if you want to show your collection. The most important experience I´d like to share is that it is important in the beginning to be active and commenting on all the students' work. On the same time  present some restrictions, as how much you as a teacher will comment on their work. It is important that the student’s don´t feel abandon, equally important to set a tone in the discussion. After a while when they start interacting, my attendance as a teacher is less important.