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I’ve just, more or less, finished the Learning to Look at the Visual Arts course run online by Oxford University. I say ‘more or less’ because I am not going to do the finishing assessment – whatever happened to learning for the love of it?

I’ve actually learnt a lot by doing the course. I would like to wholeheartedly recommend it, but I can’t. It is so very nearly good, but…..

One of the problems that I have with the course is that it is much narrower than the title suggests. Firstly, the course book is called ‘Learning to Look at Paintings’, so although the course tutor was happy to talk about other art forms the course material was inevitably heavily weighted towards painting. Secondly, even within the field of painted artwork, the course director (and book author) is only prepared to talk about the western tradition. I asked a question in one of the live chat sessions about interpretation based upon different cultural understandings of the significance of colours and was told that the course only dealt with western art. This isn’t (or at least, wasn’t) mentioned in the prospectus anywhere – I went back and checked.

My next observation is that if you find the course through web search it is (or at least, was) not obvious that the course is run by the art history department. If you browse to the course from the top level of the Oxford site then it is. The significance of the art history angle is that the primary concern of the people who run and teach is history, not aesthetics. Some of the people on the course got really excited about the historical perspective and, at times, it was less than clear we were looking at art. If your main interest is in why a picture is beautiful rather than why it exists, who owns it now, or whether the painter used a camera obscura in creating the composition, then a lot of the material can seem a bit “so what?”. I tended to skip around the material a bit and I ignored the bits that really, really, didn’t interest me. There was no problem with doing this. In fact, because most communication is asynchronous via a bulletin board, this is easier than in a real classroom as the tutor could answer my questions without wasting everybody else’s time.

As with any other education, a part of what you get out of it depends on what others put in. The drop out rate was very high and of the thirty plus starters only about ten or so reached the last furlong. For some activities the class is split into two and in my half there were only three other contributors in the final weeks. This was a real disappointment, but whether it could be avoided or not, I doubt. With such a high drop out rate I do question the wisdom of dividing the class for activities.

Some of the material in the course seemed oddly placed given the subject matter and age and experience of the participants. In response to one “what is the point of this?” question, one student was told by the tutor that is was designed to help students learn to manage their time. Hey guys, there were no teenagers on the course. I think this sort of attitude/activity helps drive away busy people who are marginal in whether they have the time to participate.

Although the structure of the course is of the ‘opportunity to learn’ type associated with Oxford, some of the material, especially in the book, appears to be prescriptive……if you look at this you will see that and you will understand the other. When challenged, the tutor and author/director are, of course, much more subtle than that, but you do have to work at it to find this out. I fear that it would be possible to go through the course methodically and come away with a very deterministic view of the whole subject.

And as a final observation, the tutor on my course had a very 1970’s like habit of throwing in political statements that were not relevant to the course material, and which were, very much, personal opinion. I’ve already got a politics degree, thanks.

So, is that three thumbs down then? Well, no. Go into it knowing what to expect and willing to bend the boundaries a bit and you ought to get a lot out of the course (on the assumption you are interested enough in the visual arts to have read this far). I’m glad to have done it. I have a large pile of books to read because of it. I learned a lot along the way.

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