Abstract:

This article intends to explore the use of the audio-visual archive of the IDECA Research Group (Research and development of audio-visual content) as a teaching tool and how the use of a digital archive of these characteristics is formulated as a practical means of improving competence acquisition in certain areas of knowledge for university students. The IDECA archive employed as a teaching tool is becomes an excellent channel to increase and improve knowledge by way of autonomous learning on the student’s part, as well as tutored learning on the part of the professor.

This educational project comes from a line of research by the IDECA group of the Fine Arts College of Cuenca and brings together work the group has carried out over the past 20 years by professors responsible for the Art History area. The result is the formation of a digital archive managed by way of information technology applications.
The basis of the project

The main objective of the IDECA archive has been the creation of an audio-visual contents archive directed toward the teaching of thematic syllabi of the following courses: Visual Art History I-II, Cinema History and Cinematographic Studies. It also facilitates research tasks aimed at graduate programs current in the college.

Our commitment to the changes carried out in the European higher education system centres on the self-formative area of students. The initiative that we have put into place consists of a tool that facilitates self-learning, one of the driving forces behind the new concept of teaching. In addition, it obliges the professor to modify his or her methodology from that of a lecture to a new model that seeks out more personalised attention and which is based on tutored learning.

This proposal is the verification of the development of audio-visual technology and its dialogue with teaching content, as well as with art history in particular with this project. This has made it possible to advance the conception of audio-visual content as a document applied to the history and practice of art, which allows for the establishment of a historical-graphic dialog complex, replete with references that, in general, deal with the evolution of Western thought. It is important to underscore that this research strategy applied to teaching makes a significant interaction possible, one that is oriented toward the construction of a critical discourse.

So, the traditional idea of an archive as a source of documentation of art history is advanced toward the perspective of an interactive archive, open to the process of critical re-construction and/or continual evolution of present documents.

Keywords:

Virtual Environments for Learning, e-learning, Teaching Software.