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Khan Academy: Free! Art History!
When we started Smarthistory 7 years ago, we thought of it as a replacement for the textbook - mostly for our own students. But along the way, we learned a lot about how we might use the web to think about teaching art history. We opened our classrooms, and opened Smarthistory to art historians, hoping in the process that together we could create a free, open resource for the teaching and learning of our discipline. We learned we could teach… 1) more experientially (why not make videos from audios recorded INSIDE the Arena Chapel or the Contarelli Chapel?) 2) more personally than the impersonal voice of the textbook 3) using lots more images than were ever available to us in the slide library (Flickr!) and tourist videos too (why not show students what’s it like to climb to the top of the Brunelleschi’s dome?) Today, Smarthistory.khanacademy.org has 250 essays and 500 videos (and all our videos and a few text pages are also on khanacademy.org).