CAA News Today

Khan Academy’s mission is a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere. In September 2013, the academy had ten million unique visitors overall. For the art-history content alone, Khan anticipates more than two million visitors from around the globe for the fall 2013 semester. Let’s make sure strong, global art-history content is well represented.

If you are interested in contributing your expertise in the form of short introductory essays to help make art history accessible to a global audience, Smarthistory could really use your help. The website’s founders, Steven Zucker and Beth Harris, seek art historians, archaeologists, and conservators in many areas of study; they have a particular need for specialists in African, Asian, precolonial American, and Pacific art.

Smarthistory has created an interactive list of topics, a Trello Board, with an eye toward supporting introductory art-history courses. If something important is missing, please let Zucker and Harris know! Once you’ve decided on a topic, send an email to Zucker and Harris (along with your CV). If everything is in order, you will be added to the Trello Board, so you can claim that topic.

Here are the essay guidelines:

• Length: 800–1,000 words
• Writing style: informal, experiential, contextual
• Content: for teaching (not original research)

As a general rule, Smarthistory looks for the narratives a great professor tells his or her class to make students fall in love with a particular subject or work of art.

All accepted contributed content is published on both khanacademy.org and smarthistory.khanacademy.org. All content is published with a Creative Commons attribution and noncommercial license. You remain the owner of your content, and your contribution is always attributed.