Jeff Kissinger and Ena Heller (Rollins College)
Cornell curators and subject mater experts Ena Heller and Amy Gaplin have teamed up with learning futurist Jeff Kissinger to engage students to forge their own authentic connections within art, its historical conext, and as a pedagogical framework for their liberal arts experience at Rollins College. Specifically, the team is currently designing a blended art appreciation course on the Cornell Alfond collection within a mobile and social learning space. The Art for Rollins text, which contains much of the Aflond collection on display at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum and the Aflond Inn at Rollins College, along with other course materials will be made available to students in an interactive, connected, mobile learning environment.
The design of this course will attempt to fundamentally exploit the unique nature of this social, mobile first learning framework. Examples may include the embedding of formative assessments for knowledge checks, non-linear learning paths to scaffold student learning, social learning, and student-generated content/knowledge. The unique, underlying theme of this concept is the situated, authentic learning opportunities afforded, engaging learners from within the actual art and course materials themselves, individually and collaboratively. Further explorations will analyze the aggregation and application of the learning analytics mined from actual student learning behavior, interactions with the faculty within texts, and from the macro learning community. New insights into how a social, mobile-first instructional design applied to an art appreciation course may influence student learning and behavior will be the focus of this project.