Abstract:

This paper describes instructional design for the online course Professional Issues in Ballet and explores the initial challenges of its implementation in classical ballet education for secondary students aged 16 to 18 in Croatia. Duration of the course is six weeks, and its successful completion requires approximately five hours per week or an hour per day. The course is developed using Croatian localization of Moodle Learning System hosted at Croatian Academic and Research Network (CARNet) Public Server (https://moodle.carnet.hr), and can be accessed via AAI electronic identity used by employees in most Croatian educational institutions. The course is designed with the goal to instruct ballet students about everyday challenges faced by professional dancers. Ballet dancers’ careers are relatively short: after reaching certain age, physical functions of human body decline and prevent dancers from successfully carrying out their profession. For this reason, dancers tend to enter employment during or immediately after completing ballet schools and their professional training usually begins in theatres. By filling the gap between education and work, online course Professional Issues in Ballet provides a valuable opportunity for professional development prior to entering the workplace. Course curriculum encompasses classical ballet skills, wide knowledge about the art of ballet and problem solving. The course is designed for blended mode of instruction. Online instruction is supervised by online tutor – ballet teacher trained in e-learning – who leads the course, assesses student skills and knowledge, facilitates student discussions and answers their questions. Instruction is based on constructivist approach and dialogical method, and tailored for small groups of six to ten students. The course heavily utilizes multimedia (primarily video and audio), which was specifically produced for the purpose. The first part of the paper exposes challenges pertaining to curriculum and course design, with a special accent to specific challenges posted by the performing character of ballet dancing. The second part of the paper explores the initial challenges pertaining to implementation of the online course in secondary classical ballet education in Croatia. Given the performing nature of ballet, authors are convinced that this case study can provide useful guidelines for implementation of e-learning in ballet education regardless language and/or cultural differences. Following the same line of reasoning, authors are convinced that the results of this case study can be generalized to related fields such as modern dance.

Keywords:

Online ballet, online dance, ballet e-learning, dance e-learning, dance education, ballet education, professional development, professional dancers.