Arts professors struggle to bring classes online

By Emma Feuz

While weeks have passed since an order to move all classes online, some teachers from Utah State University’s art school are still struggling to create learning experiences that are comparable to the ones they’ve left behind.

Many art, music and theater classes at the Caine College of the Arts are performance- or project-based. And while online formats can work well for lecture-based classes, courses requiring lab work or live performances are hard to duplicate on the internet.

“Unfortunately, ensemble classes do not have the kind of technology yet to make them as effective as they need to be,” choral professor Cory Evans said.

Evans has taken different approaches for each of his classes in the wake of the online-only order, which came in response to the global coronavirus pandemic. He has been able to continue some courses with video lectures, while others he has canceled entirely.

“Ideally, this may showcase to our administrators that nothing can take the place of live, face-to-face interaction and rehearsal,” Evans said.

Arts professors have been utilizing many different tools in an effort to make classes as normal as possible. Video chat programs such as Zoom and FaceTime have allowed professors to critique students’ musical performances. Theater students, meanwhile, are able to use those programs to rehearse with each other. Others have been taking advantage of the many recordings, museum tours and play performances that have been publicly released due to COVID-19.

“Overall, because I am a music major, the quality of my classes went way down when we transitioned online,” said Tanner Pruett, a student at the university. “The only way to improve, in my opinion, would be to have some kind of optional in-person lessons for people who are not sick, but I don’t think that will happen.”

Theater department head Adrianne Moore acknowledged that much has been lost in the transition.

“Is it as good as face-to-face? No,” Moore said. “But my faculty has worked really hard at figuring out the best way to do this.”

The switch has prompted quite a bit of creativity among teachers. Evans is creating a video compilation of individual students singing in nature by themselves as a response to the virus. Moore is preparing her students for the professional world where video auditions are common.

“If this runs into the fall semester,” Evans said, “then I will need to really scramble to think of new and unusual ways to provide the needed credit and instruction for the students.”

With no certainty as to how the pandemic will progress, Moore said it’s hard to know what the department will do moving forward.

“There are so many things that we just don't know,” said Moore, who is retiring this year. “This is not what my last semester was supposed to look like.”