Abstract:

Penn State University recently adopted a new General Education requirement for all undergraduates: a minimum of 6 credit hours of interdisciplinary coursework. The purpose is to enhance student learning by exploring the connections between two very different subject areas, thus leading to a synthesis of knowledge between the two fields. The development of Art History/Geosciences 107, “Rocks, Minerals, and the History of Art,” involved the four coauthors of this paper: two faculty members (from Art History and Geosciences), and online learning designers from two different colleges within the university (Arts and Architecture and Earth and Mineral Sciences). The course is concerned with the very stuff from which art is made, a topic that does not tend to be covered in detail in most art history courses. Similarly, geoscientists do not often address the works of art and architecture made from the materials they study. The linkage here is clear: raw material and product, and it presents opportunities for much wider analysis, for example the value of provenancing materials used in works of art and architecture, the means by which artists have obtained and manipulated materials in order to produce works of art, the characteristics of earth materials that make them desirable for inclusion in such works, economic matters of mining, trade, and monetary value, and so on. In this paper, the coauthors will discuss the process of successfully integrating not just two disciplines and teaching styles, but also two online course development methodologies! The online learning divisions of the two colleges, for example, use slightly different software platforms, and have dissimilar policies regarding open educational content and the use of images. We will briefly summarize our preparatory work and explain the format and organization of our course, before exploring the challenges inherent to combining our different fields and approaches. We will finish with a summary of the solutions we found and lessons we learned, feedback from students in our pilot semester, and a summary of the improvements we made prior to the most recent offering of the course.

Keywords:

Interdisciplinary, interdomain, collaboration, art history, geosciences, undergraduate, online course, course design, learning design.