Have you heard? Saylor.org is now hosting a complete, college-level Modern Art course – built entirely through a partnership with the Art Story Foundation!

When the Saylor Foundation’s consulting professors set out to build ARTH208: Modern Art, they stumbled upon the Art Story Foundation’s website, which hosts thousands of educational materials focused solely on Modern and Contemporary Art, including the movements, artists, timelines, ideas, and even current events. With the mission to “make modern art more accessible and digestible to the general public by providing information that is easy-to-understand, professionally designed, and logically presented,” the Art Story Foundation seemed to be a logical fit to provide top notch materials for our Modern Art curriculum. We initially contacted the Foundation to inquire about hosting their freely available copyrighted materials within our Modern Art course – a conversation that occurs with each course that we build and, in many cases, results in a simple yes or no reply.

However, this conversation turned into a very special partnership in which the Art Story Foundation agreed to step in and design the entire course, including quizzes and assessments. We were so thrilled to be the recipient of such an amazing course – and were happy to learn that our course design process, in turn, helped out The Art Story. As our own course designers have found, our course design process helped the Art Story Foundation to understand where there are holes in the information they compiled. When I spoke with Jen, Saylor’s Content Development Manager, she mentioned that the folks at the Art Story found several gaps within their information, which they quickly filled with new content, improving not only the course available on Saylor.org – but also the content they make freely available on www.theartstory.org!

If you’re interested in taking a modern art course designed by a team of art historians dedicated to making the often-misunderstood genre much easier to grasp, then check out ARTH208 on Saylor.org – or on our new iTunes U site!