exploration

=Exploration=

**Overall Context**
The course is called "Lehrgang für fotografie" at the institution www.fotoschule.at and is based in Austria´s capital Vienna. The overall reliability and bandwidth of the internet connectivity is good and the costs for bandwidth is affordable for the average course participant. The language of the course is German and at this moment, there are no online learning activities involved.

National context and photography
In Austria, there are two possibilities of running a legal business with photography. The "Meister" and press photography. Normal photographers cannot start their business without a special certificate from the "Bundesinnung für Fotografie", which is called "Meister". As "Meister" you can take any application you want. It is illegal taking an application without being a "Meister". The second possibility is being a press photographer, where no certificate is necessary. A press photographer has restriction in business, as he cannot do applications with a reproductive setup like studio. The course of the www.fotoschule.at does not allow you to open a business in photography. At the end of the course the student receives a certificate, which just proves, that you participated. The Information and Communication technology is present and affordable for everyone. The bandwidth and reliability on the internet in general in Austria is good and performing video streaming and other bandwidth intensive tasks is possible.

**The institution**
www.fotoschule.at was founded 2003 in Vienna and started with a two semester programme in photography. The founders came from the film industry and photography. The courses were promoted in the internet and their main marketing channel is via internet. There is no link to other institutions and the www.fotoschule.at designed and implemented their programme by themselves. This lack of interaction with other institutions is causing a slow progress in changing their curriculum. The institution also owns a gallery for exhibitions and events, like the final vernissage of the photography students.

**The face-to-face course**
At this moment the courses are in face-to face style. The students are coming once a week in the evening. The total workload per semester is 80h, including the hands on Workshops, theory lessons and image discussions. The image discussions and theory lessons are always on a weekday in the evening and the hands-on workshops are on weekends mostly one whole day. The course offers a two semester term in photography. The key topics of the first semester are:
 * Imageanalysis
 * technical basics in photography I
 * Composition
 * light
 * Black and White process
 * Stilllife
 * digital manipulation

The workshops of the second semester are:
 * Portraitphotografie
 * Flashlights
 * Arquitecturephotography
 * Reportagephotography
 * Landscapephotography

**The learners**
The typical learner at this institution is between 20 and 60 years old, has no professional background in photography and has a normal dayjob. The main interest is to improve the knowledge in photography as a hobby. Normal classes are from 10 to 15 students and there are four groups per semester which results around 100 students per year. The pre-knowledge of the learner is very diverse, but the most have very little or almost no knowledge. Almost everyone has internet connectivity and enough computer or information technology skills to participate in an online intervention.

**The teachers**
The teachers are mostly professionals in photography or art. There is a need of specialists in the area of photography, so each area has a specialist as a teacher. The most teachers are part time and have other jobs. Some teachers have no formal education in photography, they are autodidacts in photography.

Learning theory
The grounded learning theory is socio constructivism, because of the complex nature of image discussion. Image composition is not a step-by-step and result task, it is a higher order thinking process with a variety of parameters, which leads to a good or a bad image. Vygotsky mentioned, for learning higher order skills, it is necessary to use mediating artifacts, which scaffolds the instructional dialogue (Ravenscroft, 2003, p.9). In this learning task, the mediating artifact is the Forum, which scaffold the instructional dialogue between the students with guidance of the tutor. Image discussion can be considered as not trivial and be learned without any help from outside. Therefore mediating artifacts play a big role in solving this learning problem. The different levels of knowledge can help the students with fewer skills to construct their knowledge with the help of the higher skilled students. So the learning theory, which suits best for this kind of intervention, is the socio constructivist, including interactivity between the students and between the students and the tutors. With the online intervention, this informal learning should come more and more formal within the course.

The online learning model
The chosen online learning design is Pebble-in-the-pond(Merrill,2002) which provides us with five ripples or pebbles of the pond.

Problem and problem progression
The specification of the problem has two steps. (1) specify a typical problem that represents the whole task and (2) how to work the problem.(Merrill,2002,p.41). The specification of the problem indicates, that the complete problem should be identified, and not just some information about the problem. And in the second step should give an exact plan, on how to resolve the problem. The progression of the problem is a process of enhancing the complexity of the problem. It means that the problem becomes more sophisticated. This can happen by adding more complexity or more difficulty, which requires more skills and knowledge to resolve the task.

Image Discussion is an important tool in the learning process in photography. The main problem with image discussions is the "personal touch" of every contributor. This means, everyone has a different perception of criticising a photo, depending very often more on emotion and personal flavor than on the photographic rules. Of course, photographic rules are here to break, but for a critical analysis of an Image, it is important to know the basic rules of composition, color management and others and how these rules are applied. These rules are not always applied correctly to the image discussion, and students are not able to discuss their Images correctly.

The work plan to overcome this problem is to get known crucial photographic rules and apply them to an image discussion process. This takes two steps, first, learning about one criterion in photography and then apply it to an image by discussing it. These two steps have to be repeated, until the most crucial image features in photography are learned and applied. There must be a room for discussing own photos in order to motivate students to stay with the task.

The instructional problem of the teaching is the inflexible and uncritical image analysis. The learning with image discussion is not happening effectively, because the discussion is often emotional, which leads to comments like, "the picture is nice". Currently Students bring their pictures and receive feedback which is a very behaviorist way of teaching. This teaching creates problems with the variety of different levels of the students knowledge. Students with advanced knowledge will me under challenged and the beginners could be over challenged. So the main challenge is the different ZPDs of the students To overcome these different levels of knowledge and benefit all the stakeholders we chose a collaborative learning task for image analysis.

Component Analysis
The component analysis identifies all knowledge components to complete each of the tasks in the progression ripple.(Merrill, 2002, p. 42) The components of the image discussion learning tasks are:
 * 1) provision of learning material as a video lecture or as a tutorial.
 * 2) interactive discussion of a picture as a forum.

There are almost fifteen different criterias to discuss about in a picture. So, every iteration of image discussion is about three criterias. This means, the whole learning task has five iterations until all relevant criterias for image discussion are learned.

Instructional strategy
All the content that will enable the learner to acquire the knowledge is identified at this point of design.(Merrill, 2002, p. 42). Here the problem, problem progression and the component analysis find their way together and the instructional strategy informs about how the learner engages with these. Merrill mentioned the strategy of diminishing guidance as a strategy, which fits very well into the image discussion task. Because due to the process of acquiring more knowledge of image analysis, the student will know how the tool works and he will know gradually better, how to critisise an image.

**The outcomes**
The most general outcome of this learning task is that **the student can make better photographic images**. This is the single most important outcome of the whole course and the main driver for the student to enroll in this course. The Image analysis task plays his role to achieve this outcome. The outcome itself is not that easy to observe and to measure. A good picture is defined by everyone differently, but there are rules like the golden ratio or others, which help the artist to align and compose the Image more interesting.

The main outcome of taking better Images comes with sub outcomes:
 * The student knows the key features of composition and color management**. The student learns and knows key features of composition and color management.
 * The student applies these key features to analyze Images.** He can discuss Images in a structured way and knowing, why he or she likes a picture better and he or she can articulate this.
 * The student applies these key features to his own photography in post processing.** He can critically review his own photographic work and use the knowledge of composition in analize critically. The student can post process his or her pictures based on the knowledge of the rules.
 * The student can analyze images in a structured way.** The student can apply the composition rules to any situation and composes, before the shutter of the camera released. So, he is producing higher quality raw material.

The design outcome is the provision of an effective and meaningful environment for image discussion. The student feels comfortable in using the tools and it is easy to learn these tools.