Sarah Buck
Sarah Buck (PhD ’17) is an alumna of the Department of Art History’s MA and PhD programs and has been the instructor of record for the department’s online course ARH 2000 (Art, Architecture, & Artistic Vision) since 2019.
In 2013 Dr. Buck and Dr. Kyle Killian began redesigning the face-to-face art appreciation course for online delivery, in collaboration with the FSU Office of Distance Learning (ODL). The course was first offered online the following year on the Blackboard platform, In recognition of their work in designing and implementing the course, Buck and Killian received two awards from ODL: the Award for Excellence in Online Course Design and the Award for Excellence in Online Mentoring.
Over the next few years, Buck completed her doctorate and simultaneously took on the role of instructor of record for ARH 2000. She undertook an extensive redesign with the University’s migration to Canvas in 2018, and most recently upgraded the class so to meet the FSU Diversity requirement starting in Fall 2022. She now coordinates a cadre of 20 course mentors – graduate assistants and adjuncts who interact directly with the 1000+ students enrolled in ARH 2000 each semester.
In recent years Sarah has also assisted other faculty in creating, converting, and upgrading existing face-to-face or online classes so that they meet FSU undergraduate requirements for upper-division writing and digital literacy. In the early spring of 2020, Buck began to work with Dr. Richard Emmerson to convert his popular FSU E-series course Apocalypse: The End of the World in Art to an online asynchronous platform. At the time the goal was to make the course available to students in other time zones or in academic programs that limited their schedule availability. In the middle of planning, the pandemic brought a new urgency to the project, and Sarah simultaneously completed both the fall version and a compressed version of the course for the Summer C 2020 semester. She and Dr. Emmerson put the finishing touches on the summer course in June, just days before the semester began. Buck also made time that summer to collaborate with other FSU faculty and TAs who were rushing to adapt Art History courses to the remote environment. Her expertise was invaluable (read more).
In addition to her work for FSU, Sarah is an adjunct instructor for Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University’s School of Architecture + Engineering Technology, where she has taught architectural history courses since 2018.