Who We Are
eLearning Media, Inc. is a non-profit organization dedicated to the production of original, quality audio and visual multimedia presentations for use by educational institutions, professors and students in Distance Education, or Online Learning courses in the Humanities. Founder Fred Sigman has spent a lifetime traveling the world as an art historian, photographer, and filmmaker. Please visit his personal website: www.fredsigman.com
This organization is an outgrowth of Fred's own search for quality media assets for incorporation in his online humanities and art history courses that for over a decade he has taught at several universities and colleges. While there are digital image libraries online that provide quality content, there remain few resources for good audio and video 'learning assets' produced specifically for teaching the humanities. Until the founding of eLearning Media, Inc.
What We Do
An advantage of these original media projects is that they are produced by a professor of Global Art History who is also a photographer and filmmaker. Understanding the learning content and visual needs of teachers and students, Fred and his team produce digital media projects that reflect an appreciation of global communities, and the histories and cultures that contribute to that uniquely human behavior called ‘art.’
In 2005, Fred taught his online Survey of Asian Art course to students in the United States while he was traveling through seven Asian countries. With a DSLR camera and small HD Video camera, he recorded his journeys, lecturing along the way. From the Buddhist temples of Sukhothai, Thailand, to artist studio visits in Bali, Fred produced short documentaries that he would stream back to his students. Often narrated, sometimes with only ambient sounds of the enviroment, these mini-documentaries and multimedia presentations were more than travelogues or on-site lectures. Students are much more able to connect with a body of academic material when they can relate to the subjects and the content is presented in an interesting and lively manner. In the tradition of documentary filmmaking, many of these projects are narratives and stories of artists, villagers, places and customs. They attempt to have a point of view without being pedantic.
In the course of that semester, Fred, along with his son who served as the editor, produced about thirty such media presentations. The workflow for each presentation, which took about 48 hours, involved scripting, shooting, editing, recording of voice over narration, and any other post work necessary for the digital images. If not at a hotel with WiFi, Fred would go to the nearest Cyber Café to upload the media to his server, then make it available through the Distance Education program used by his institution.
Beginning in the Spring of 2011, eLearning Media will make available to educational institutions, along with their teachers and students, a full catalog of media projects that are adaptable to most online teaching courses in the humanities. And for the campus based lecture, they will be made available for streaming in a Smart Classroom.
The 'Projects ' page will give you some idea of the topics presently under development. With the launch of this media library, we anticpate having about one thousand multimedia presentations available with more being added every month. Since all digital media has a 'shelf life,' new projects will be added with older ones re-edited and updated as necessary. Since these presentations will be used as supplementary to other learning assets, the running time of the presentations vary from five to twelve minutes each.