Resource Center: Online Courses
Academy of Art University, Photography Online
Part of a growing trend in online higher education, this San Francisco-based art school offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in photography. True to the nature of this new way of teaching and learning, class outlines include hardware and software requirements, video introductions from teachers and links to their personal websites.
The Great Courses
Never underestimate the power of a great course delivered by a great teacher - it can be life-changing - and this company has selected gifted teachers from the most recognized colleges and universities in the U.S. to produce classes tailored to a broad audience. The Great Courses has put together over 390 courses on a range of mainly Humanities-based subjects, gathered from Ivy League, Stanford, Georgetown, and other leading well-regarded university professors. Customers have important influence on which courses are selected as their feedback is essential to determining which courses are worthy of the title “Great.”
Khan Academy – Getty Museum on Photography
The virtual learning non-profit, Khan Academy, and the pride of Los Angeles’ museum community, The Getty, collaborate on this series of short documentaries about photography: videos that investigate photographers, photo processes, artistic insights, and technological convergences. If Khan Academy’s positive, do-it-yourself approach to learning might seem at odds with The Getty’s stylish bastion of culture, the results of the collaboration are content-rich and illuminating. The collection is an open invitation to listen to artists such as Dorothea Lang and John Humble talk about their artistic processes, or discover the now arcane processes for making Daguerreotypes and other early printing processes. An unexpected bonus for the casual viewer: watching just a couple of films will earn you a Khan Academy “badge.”
Luminous-Lint
Luminous-Lint is the result of one man’s laudable mission to get us all involved in the creation of “the world’s leading collaborative knowledge-base for the history of photography,” and that knowledge-base includes a wealth of material for self-instruction. Information in this complex but very user-friendly site, is organized by searchable sections that include themes, photographers, techniques, galleries and dealers, as well as times lines. Luminous-Lint makes very good use of the web’s elastic nature: each link in these sections unfolds into an amazingly rich page of historical and practical information, closely connected with other pages - including eclectic photo galleries - in order to give the most complete picture possible. The most original feature of Luminous-Lint is its very personal and direct requests for input; the site is dotted with areas for feedback and ways to get involved in building the content. The interactive nature of the site, somewhat like a Wikipedia for the history of photography, opens the door to an original and more comprehensive way of researching and displaying photographic history.
Poynter News University
Using an entirely online teaching model, Poynter News University offers training to journalists of all descriptions through the media of self-directed courses, webinars, blogs and broadcasts. This e-learning experiment was built around the Poynter Institute’s desire to promote independence and integrity in journalism in new and innovative ways. It seems to be working: NewsU now counts over 280,000 registered users.
School of Photography
School of photography.com specializes in tutor-directed, correspondence-style classes. It offers a range of photography courses designed to cover the needs of amateurs to professionals. The FAQ page answers the obvious "how does this work" questions, while the student galleries show off the tangible results of online learning.
The University of Central Florida’s Casio Classroom
The University of Central Florida’s Casio Classroom maintains a site that is designed as a reference tool that puts educators in touch with creative educational applications for digital cameras in educational settings. Submitted lessons and applications that have beenused successfully in the classroom are displayed for other educators to view and print.