The Digital Upload: First Time For The New Course – What To Do!

This all relates to the imminent visual arts examination session.

It goes without saying (I hope) that you should have everything ready for the upload well BEFORE you start the upload process: that means, for example, a digital folder called “Exhibition” containing a series of folders for the exhibition files for each of your students.

OK, the nitty gritty: in order of things to be uploaded.

The upload starts with IBIS.

You should have your User ID, password and PIN ready.

1 Predicted Grade and IA (internal assessment)

The deadline for both is Sunday April 10^th.

The predicted grade should reflect overall achievement in the grade descriptors document.

The internal assessment component is THE EXHIBITION.

No files are uploaded (yet) – you are just giving the IB information about the achievement of your students.

Both the remaining due dates (20 and 30 April) require files (“uploaded materials”) for internal and external components.

2 The Exhibition

The next deadline is Wednesday April 20^th.

The exhibition upload is the most complex because it involves multiple files and multiples file types (unlike the other uploads) – so I’m going to go through this in some detail.

Each image file should be 5 MB or less, but most files will probably not exceed 3MB because 5MB is more than most people will need, and larger file sizes frequently mean unnecessarily slow/long upload and download times.

Each video file should be 500 MB or less and not exceed 5 minutes. Also remember that the examiner is not interested in any sound track – so you might as well not include any sound.

You should also have available the curatorial rationale for each student and the exhibition text for each artwork.

For any 3D work that you have not videoed you may want to add ‘detail’ photographs showing views of the 3D piece from different angles.

(My feeling is that use of these optional extra photos should be kept to a minimum. In most cases one good photograph that allows zooming will be fine. If HL students start uploading 30 or 33 photographs for their 10 or 11 artworks and the extra photographs add little to the main photo, you are likely to rapidly exhaust the examiner’s reserves of patience and goodwill. Don’t just add extra photos because you can: only add them if they provide important information that is not available in the main photograph.)

You should also have files for two exhibition ‘overview’ photographs for each student. These used to be optional but they are now required. There also used to be the option to upload a video of the exhibition – that has stopped. The file options are JPG or TIF – no videos allowed.

These exhibition views are not assessed but provide the examiner with important additional information about the exhibition layout and arrangement, the size and scale of work etc. Sometimes these views show the audience at the reception, and /or the proud student beaming in front of his favourite artwork. Please DON’T do this – all we want to see is the exhibition.

File types

The acceptable files types for the artwork and exhibition files are JPEG and TIF for ‘still’ photos and F4V, M4V, MOV, and MP4 for video.

The rationale is file type DOC, DOCX, PDF, or RTF

The Exhibition text is entered when uploading the images. This will state title, medium, size and a brief outline of intentions—500 characters. This can be a copy/paste process.

3 Comparative Study and Process Portfolio

Deadline for both is  Saturday April 30^th.

The comparative study is a single PDF (max size 20MB) with an additional list of sources, DOC, DOCX, PDF, or RTF.

The process portfolio is a single PDF file maximum size 20MB.

Reminder – the process portfolio must not include finished work that is part of the exhibition (to avoid duplication of work; duplication of work is considered a form of academic misconduct).

If your student wants to show the final outcome, he/she can include it – but it must not then be included in the exhibition.

And there you are! Pop that champagne! All done!

Reminder:

If during the upload you suddenly realize that you don’t have a file needed for the upload, you don’t have to start again from the beginning – IBIS does allow you to make partial uploads. So you can save where you got to and return later to continue the upload (unless it’s April 30th, in which case you (or your coordinator) may have to throw yourself on the mercy of IB to ask for an extension – which they may or may not agree to).

So…finally:

• Do not leave any of this until the last minute.
• Allow yourself time in case something goes wrong or you need more time.
• Be organized – organization is the key!

I plan on starting each upload at least a week before each deadline.

Cheers – and good luck!

Images

https://pixabay.com/static/uploads/photo/2016/01/07/17/53/time-1126254_960_720.png

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/71/Arbcom_ru_ready.svg/2000px-Arbcom_ru_ready.svg.png