Faculty Spotlight, October 2013
Martha MacLeish: Creating on Online Learning Space for the Art Critique
Martha MacLeish, Associate Professor and Head of the Fundamentals Area in the School of Fine Arts, taught S200: Drawing in the Digital Age fully online for the first time during the summer of 2013. This course explores how the digital imaging technologies in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop can be used to create expressive drawings. An essential aspect of teaching any studio art class is the critique of art projects, and Professor MacLeish discovered that IU Box enabled students to upload their projects as Illustrator files so that other students could provide peer review. Along with file sharing, IU Box allows commenting on each file by every person in the shared folder. A key to success in this peer review process was to assign each student to review the work of two of their peers following criteria established by the professor, with specific questions on the elements of art that were the focus of the assignment. According to Professor MacLeish, the students wrote good comments, as good as anything she would have gotten from an in-class critique, and every student participated, which is an added benefit of using Box.