Sylvia Lahav, Tate Modern, London
Mac Campeanu and Jean Kerrigan, City Literary Institute, London

An Introduction to Tate Modern

Keywords: distance learning, online art course, landscape, Tate Modern

How it all Began

The idea for an online course was first proposed by Jean Kerrigan, a part-time tutor in art history at the City Literary Institute (City Lit), London. Jean had studied for the Certificate in Online Education and Training at the Institute of Education University of London and was very keen to explore the possibility of devising an online course in collaboration with the art history department. She approached Mac Campeanu, head of the department, who was enthusiastic about the idea. Although the City Lit had decided to make a one-off special project allowance to finance the venture, they really also needed to find a partner institution.

Moving ahead with a project which would certainly need to use reproductions of paintings might be an expensive exercise, unless they were able to form a partnership with a London museum, which they thought would solve any copyright problems. They made their first approach to the education department of the Tate Gallery. This was in 1998. As the curator responsible for adult programmes and courses, Sylvia Lahav was their main contact. She became very interested in the idea of launching an online course and another meeting was arranged with Information Technology specialists at the Tate. This was the first of many meetings. The Tate was understandably cautious about any online project and the copyright issues it might raise.

Although 1998 seems hardly decades away, online courses were still in their infancy and the logistics of launching online projects were still to be worked through. Jean Kerrigan and Mac Campeanu were tireless in their pursuit of a project they were sure could work. It was January 2000 before the Tate felt ready to commit. By then, Sylvia had moved from the Tate Gallery to the new Tate Modern, so the project had the advantage of the enormous amount of interest this new gallery of modern art was generating. Toby Jackson, head of Interpretation and Education at Tate Modern gave his blessing for the project to go ahead. However, budgets were restricted so it was decided that the project should be a pilot scheme, for which City Lit had already secured some money.

What it was

We decided that the online course would focus on just one of Tate Modern's four suites. Landscape seemed a good idea as we had already discussed how we might use Tate in its environment as the basis for our first lesson.

The landscape suite would also allow us to engage with our online students in a more personal way, to ask questions about their own landscape, where they lived, their surroundings etc. Our concept was that the course might attract the elderly, the homebound, those in hospital or those in prison and by using the first lesson to invite our students to describe their own surroundings we could make a personal and important immediate connection.

Time was short. We now had the go ahead but it was already May 2000 and we were committed to run our course by September of that year. If we knew then what we know now, we would never have been so ambitious! But this was the stuff of dreams and luckily we were not too daunted by the incredibly short timescale.

Mac is an amazingly talented photographer, Jean a brilliant and visionary person with well-formed ideas about online education, a complete commitment to the project and seemingly inexhaustible energy to push the project forward. Sylvia's part in the scheme was to offer Tate as a resource, to investigate copyright, obtain permission for audio material, approach Tate curators, help Jean with writing content and generally work as the liaison person between our two institutions.

Because of the short time we had, we devised a project plan fairly quickly. We knew that we wanted to begin the course with a view of Tate situated within a panoramic 360 degree view of London and that we wanted Tate director Lars Nittve to welcome our virtual students as they 'arrived' (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 'An Introduction to Tate Modern'. Home Page.

We knew that we wanted to virtually 'walk' into the gallery and then make our way up to level three, to the landscape suite. We knew that we wanted to introduce our students to the ideas behind the course in this first lesson and to follow this with at least six 'lessons' looking at different rooms within the suite. We knew that we wanted to look at a range of rooms: some large, some small, some monographic, some thematic, some chronologically hung. And above all we wanted the course to be interactive at every level with provocative questions, web links, video and audio commentaries.

As soon as we had made definite decisions about the displays we might use, the question of copyright was on the agenda. How naive we were to think that working with a museum would wipe out all of these problems! Even when a museum owns a work, it hardly ever owns the copyright, so each and every image would have to be negotiated with DACS (Design and Artists Copyright Society). Fortunately, Sylvia was put in touch with Siobhan O'Leary from DACS who was able to negotiate a very fair overall price for the images we needed. This was based on our project being a pilot scheme for about 100 students over the year, password protected with low-resolution images. We should say that we had already decided to make the online course available as a CD-ROM. This was imperative because we would never have been allowed to use the same images on the web.

Mac found a good team of graphic designers called Mantarey. We were so lucky to find this team of two. They were technically brilliant, interested in the project and willing to listen to our ideas. Mac began the photography: hundreds of shots, close ups, QuickTime VR and outside shots. Jean and Sylvia began to write the text. Jean had a clear idea of the length and number of questions we should ask. For Sylvia it was really difficult knowing how much material to include in the course. We now realise that even one question can initiate a week's discussion, but at this point we were still labouring under the misapprehension that we needed to write an essay for each image.

By the end of the summer we had managed to put the images, the text, the glossary and the 'set up' material together. Then it was over to Mantarey to make the whole thing work, and look beautiful!

When we saw the first proof it was quite a shock, but also very exciting. We changed some text, a number of icons, and made some new decisions about presentation. The finished CD was produced by September 2000, a real feat by any standards. The course was scheduled to begin in October that year. We enrolled about 20 students.

Running the course

Online teaching is not easy. Jean had much more experience, for Sylvia it was all new. We had chosen ABACUS as hosts for our virtual college using FirstClass conferencing software for the online discussion.

Fig. 2. The panoramic view of the gallery 'Structure and Form' and a list of related questions.

As our 20 students reached the end of the first lesson and had begun to respond to the questions posed, the enormity of the task hit!

We had incredible answers. Not just one-liners, but amazingly insightful, perceptive, philosophical discussions about the notion of museums, space, landscape and then, of course, each one of our chosen artists. Every evening Jean and Sylvia would be greeted with a mass of red flags (denoting messages from our students).

Problems with online education

We learned such a lot in those eight weeks. There were problems controlling the level of input. Some students were 'quieter' than others and it was difficult making sure that these slightly more passive students were not put off by the other more dominant ones. Jean and Sylvia made a note to divide the group into two for the next course.

Tutoring /facilitating an online course is incredibly time consuming. Tutor/facilitators need to handle their students sensitively but firmly. A great deal of intellectual and factual information is needed to answer student responses. No 'yes/ no' answers here! Strategies need to be devised to cope with unruly or over demanding online students.

Online courses are not cheap, either to make or to administer, so any hope that IT alone will solve problems of mass adult education should be quickly abandoned.

With all this said, it was an amazing experience. We still show our CD-ROM, which is considered an example of best practice and the online course is still part of The City Lit's adult learning programme.

Online courses need time, research and money and above all they need the strong financial backing of at least one organisation, and persons of commitment, energy and vision.

November 2001