II. Practical Exploration
In light of the fact that the students are absolute beginners–sometimes lacking online learning experience–and also expect results after a short course, the project team custom designed the course’s environment, curriculum, learner support, and process management.
(I) Learning Environment Design
1. Principle of Minimalism
The project’s students were primarily adults with a weak foundation in education: 82.01% of them had never studied traditional landscape painting, and 65.95% of the students had never participated in online learning. As such, it was necessary to minimise the complexity of the learning environment to help students focus their time and energy on the course content. A minimal unified design was designed (See Figures 1 and 2), with the online courses presented on both the web page and the app in a fixed mode. In the design of the mobile application in particular, the interface contains only two options: functional and task areas. Only four buttons are located in the function area: the Chinese characters for “credits,” “rank,” “information,” and “me” respectively take students to an overview of accumulated credits, ranking, additional information, and an individual centre. In the task area, a large, dark-coloured, circular button labeled “Week N” indicates course progress and links to a course description for that week which introduces learning contents and requirements to students. Small, black, circular buttons labeled with the days of the week–these are located in between each “Week N” button–link to daily learning tasks. In this way, each week’s materials are simple and easy to follow.
Figure 1 Learning Environment of Moodle Webpage
2. Convenience
Figure 2 App Learning Environment
The biggest difficulty in implementing “the landscape painting project” is that students were unable to agree on a fixed study time. The overwhelming majority of students were working students, while the retired accounted for only 21.84%. As a result, 60.6% of students said it was difficult to dedicate time to their studies; 49.89% chose to study on weekends, and 67.88% could only study in the evening. Nonetheless, the learning environment must facilitate study and progress for all learners. The app was developed on the Moodle platform, with a WeChat group organised for virtual classes. The three-in-one connection offers students the opportunity to learn anywhere and anytime, so that students can conveniently study even in fragmented periods of time. Due to their lifestyle, 94.53% of students reported learning via a mobile internet equipment. At the same time, the landscape painting learning app was designed to be compatible with interactive media and live broadcast. In this way, the app meets the learning needs of the overwhelming majority of students, facilitating even fragmented study.
3. Interaction
Teachers’ online tutoring is extremely helpful to students enrolled in online courses. As such, interaction in the distance learning environment is becoming an increasingly prominent research topic (Wang Zhijun, et al. 2016). Teaching painting requires extensive practice, with the proportion of time spent in theoretical study to hands-on practice often being 1 to 4, or even 1 to 5. Extensive practice exercises increases the demands on both the quantity and quality of teaching interactions. In order to meet these elevated demands, the learning environment of “the landscape painting project” was meant to guarantee convenient teacher-student interaction. Whether via computer or mobile device, teacher-student interaction was possible at all times. The system improves interactive efficiency by solving problems particular to BBS and WeChat, as well as those common among live broadcast tools. The completely interactive function of the system provides convenient support to teacher-student exchanges throughout the implementation of the entire project, and has become a major feature.
4. Intelligence
Online teaching applies data-rich online technology to teaching. Big data will bring about three core changes to learning: real-time feedback on learning will be informed by data collected in a timely manner, the individual needs of each student will be met, and learning content and methods will be optimised through predictive analytics. Because the learning environment of “the landscape painting project” is based on Moodle, it has a perfectly built-in function to collect data. Based on detailed teaching data from Moodle, the project team converts the specific learning behaviour of each student into accumulated credits through system parameters, ranks students by the number of accumulated credits, and evaluates their learning behaviour, thus generating individualised and timely feedback on learning behaviours. Such individualised feedback becomes a positive incentive for students to achieve their educational goals.
（II）Course design
1. Choosing and organising content
In order to meet students’ psychological expectation of making progress in a short period of time, concise and fast methods directly related to the course theme were designed to help students achieve their goal of completing the coursework in a short period of time.
The first tactic was to abridge traditional teaching content. A comprehensive landscape painting course usually includes three stages: copying, sketching, and creating. Different schools have slightly different arrangements for the three stages. While some emphasise the three-in-one arrangement, giving equal teaching time to copying, sketching, and creating, others give decreasing priority to copying, sketching, and creating in turn, with less class hours for each stage. However, the three stages are an indispensable part of landscape painting learning as a whole. Due to the limited time in “the landscape painting project,” much content from the comprehensive system had to be cut. In addition to the reduction of theoretical content, only content related to copying was retained, with both sketching and creating eliminated to ensure the fulfillment of teaching objectives. Copying, as a basic skill, where the study of landscaping begins. The copying of landscape paintings in specialised institutes usually lasts several semesters, totaling over 300 class hours. Limited by the project’s course length, copying was further simplified to include only the parts necessary to complete works.
The second method involved making an overall plan of the learning process. In order to enable students to master the most basic skills necessary to complete a painting in the shortest possible time, the project team organised course instruction in the chronological order of how a beginner creates a landscape painting. The entire course was divided into nine units, with each unit lasting one week. In the first week, students are trained “to think like a painter.” They are required to master basic methods of observation, as well as learn the painting tools and the methods of drafting and outline sketching a copy of a landscape painting. One key is borrowing the concepts and techniques of Western paintings, to introduce the concept of proportion to traditional Chinese landscape paintings, to fully leverage adults’ ability to think abstractly and re-construct spaces, and to help students determine an overall framework. In the second week, students learn expression methods through brush and ink in Chinese paintings, and they are required to master the basic techniques of landscape painting, including outline drawing, ax-cut texture stroke, ink touch, brush dyeing, and adjusting an outline and stroke. After two weeks of study, students are able to copy an entire work. In their third week, students learn how to appreciate Chinese paintings. What they have learned during the first two weeks is strengthened as they become more proficient in the techniques of modeling, as well as brush and ink, by comparing the differences between Eastern and Western paintings. In the fourth week, students focus on learning how to draw trees and leaves, as well as the strokes of mountains and stones. This enables them to feel the unique expression of space and light in Chinese paintings, as well as the artistic concept and style of landscape paintings. By this point, students have learned every composition principle and technique of landscape paintings. Further study consolidates and improves their technique through continued practice copying classical paintings. In the fifth week, they copy Ni Yunlin’s “Lonely Pine Trees by Flowing Mountain Stream,” expressing the trees, leaves, and stones in light ink. In the sixth week, students copy Wen Zhengming’s “Album of Landscape Paintings” in order to grasp skills related to touching up scenery, people, trees and stones using ink. In the seventh week, they copy Shen Zhou’s works to work on sketching outlines using inky brushes. In the eighth week, they copy the eighth painting works of Wang Meng’s “Painting Book of Springs, Mountains, Wind, and Rain” on ten separate pieces of paper (28.3cm x 40.5cm) to master horizontal composition, light ink strokes, and adjusting outlines and strokes with ink. In the ninth week, they learn to copy Huang Gongwang’s “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains” to master horizontal composition and the technique of ax-cut texture stokes with brushes and ink. After four weeks studying techniques and five weeks copying, the students will have completed copying one painting each week. At the end of the ninth week, most of the students are able to master the basic techniques of landscape painting, and to finish copying high quality works (See Figure 3).
The third strategy involves determining appropriate evaluation criteria. Most of the students participating in the project begin learning landscape painting with zero foundation. Because the skill level they attain after such a short period of study may be limited, there are no unfairly high standards demanded of students. Their learning is predominated by copying small paintings or parts of larger paintings; prioritises the mastery of basic techniques, and focuses on the integrity of the paintings. No high standard requirements are made with regards to details like the subtlety of brush and ink, and the accuracy of expression. If students complete each week’s copying exercise, they meet the minimum standards of the course.