Views on online art learning

[pandora206]

Have you used any online resources since lockdown, and if so what have you and your children found useful? Is there anything else that would be useful?

Our arts centre is considering what help we could give to the community while children and young people are out of school. We have resident artists who could support with this but we are a charity with limited funds.

The views of parents and teachers would be welcomed.

Thanks

We've done a couple of online creative courses as a family since lockdown. One was not great; it was based on a particular artist and ended up being a paint by numbers exercise recreating one of her artworks. There were over 400 participants on the Zoom meeting so no personal interaction or feedback from the tutor.

With a different organisation we did a set design class which was much better managed. 15 children in the Zoom meeting and the tutor steered the class but allowed them to be creative and think up their own designs rather than being prescriptive.

We did art classes before lockdown and the one thing I really valued for my daughter was the fact she was encouraged to use her imagination and create her own artwork.

If you're doing live events then I would limit the number of participants or otherwise post videos that people can watch and pause as they need to. About an hour to 90 minutes worked well for us in terms of concentration span.

TFSRM thanks for your helpful comments. I think Zoom meetings don't always work particularly well with larger numbers (from my own experiences). Your point about posting a video that can be paused makes a lot of sense for more than a handful of participants. I think we are all learning from these new technologies.

Can I ask one or two specific questions:

• How did you hear about the classes?
• Were they free or paid for?
• Did you have the materials to hand?
• Were the children's art works displayed after the event/s?

We really don't want to reinvent the wheel if there are good resources out there so we're keen to have feedback (including from the children themselves).

Thanks

We heard about one class on Facebook and the other one we are on the mailing list already.

The first class with 400+ people was paid and was about £5 (so they were doing quite well £££ for a 90 min session - I get there is preparation work etc but still). The better class was free but we chose to make a donation of £5 plus gift aid.

We are lucky in that we already had suitable art materials for both classes but I would say it is worth advising what materials would be needed when people book/ sign up.

There was an option to post the art work online afterwards but we didn't do that.

I definitely think there is scope for more online art tuition and I certainly would be interested for my daughter and for me and my husband. We particularly like classes we can do as a family. I personally like some level of technical tuition eg being shown the proportions to draw a face.

TFSRM thank you. That's helpful.

I'm going to try to have a look at some online classes to get a sense of what they are offering so that we can decide whether there is a gap that we could fill.