Part one in a three-part series, the following explores lessons learned from remote teaching/learning experiences during a global pandemic. Based on a presentation given at Loyola University, New Orleans, 2020.
Original photo by Natural Visions/Alamy Stock Photo
THE QUALITY OF YOUR MUSIC IS GOING TO BE REFLECTED BY THE NATURE OF THE CULTURE THAT YOU COME OUT OF. —Ellis Marsalis
To say my career has been a diverse one would be an understatement. I’ve been an architect, a graphic designer, a project manager, a creative director, an onsite and online design educator, and, more recently, an academic administrator for the largest comprehensive design schools at the nation’s #1 university for innovation.
I’m a designer, and thus a design thinker. I see complex problems from multiple points of view, and I use the myriad of tools available to me from my varied backgrounds to approach each problem differently.
And like everyone else in academia right now, I’m looking at a seriously complex problem—assessing the damage and possibilities of teaching during and after a global pandemic.
EVERYTHING HANGS ON SOMETHING ELSE. —Ray Eames
Shortly after graduating from the Academy of Art University with an MFA in graphic design, I was hired by my alma mater to oversee the development and implementation of online content and curriculum. Walking in the virtual door, I had some changes in mind.
Almost immediately, I started investigating how we might use social media structures to revise our teaching materials. Dark, depressing, long, and cumbersome videos became shorts built using bright colors and jazzy music. Lectures moved from text-based pages to narrated films showcasing lessons and objectives in the real world. And commonly recurring materials set the foundation for a shared teaching assets library that would be utilized by students in both online and onsite environments.
When I moved to The Design School at Arizona State University, I took many of these ideas with me. The school had no online degree programs at the time, which was unusual given the programs it offered and the resources available to teach the ever-expanding volume of students.
But the Design School did had a desire to rethink what design education could be, opening it to a more inclusive audience, while establishing partnerships across the University and profession aimed at putting design in the center of every conversation. And I had a desire to be in those conversations, as I had ideas on how to make that happen.
Shortly after joining the School, I initiated discussions with program heads and online liaisons about ideas surrounding online degrees, stackable learning assets, microcredentialing, and certificate programs. These discussions led to the creation of one recently launched online degree, with another in the works, two more lined up to build within the next two years, three minors in the proposal phases, and our first certificate option in the final phases of implementation, all coming into focus within the first 18 months of my arrival. Beyond this, we’ve been creating learning assets that can be shared with our academic partners in Engineering and Business, getting design into their curriculum one lesson at a time.
In these experiences—tearing apart curriculum and degree plans to find modular content, reframing lessons to fit into sharable smaller chunks, opening conversations and putting design in classes across the university, and convincing a faculty who refused to move online to quickly and successfully do just that—I learned a few things about online education.
First, you’ll always get the side-eye when you start talking about online.
It is seen as lesser than its onsite counterpart. There’s a perception of disparity in the resources between onsite and online campuses, from access to labs and studio spaces to the “college experience” so many current students hope to have.
Studies have shown that most students, especially those early in their academic journeys, prefer an onsite experience, despite having grown up with smartphones in their hands. The chance to meet future business partners, the connection to the profession provided via lecture series, alumni events, and adjunct faculty—that gateway to their future careers is what current generations expect to find on the college campus. Those are harder to recreate in a digital environment, or at least that’s how some students see things.
Second, online education is a lot harder than it seems, for everyone involved.
Students need to be self-motivated to get through the materials and stay on top of their studies. Quick questions can take hours or days to get answered, meaning it’s frequently up to the student to investigate that answer on their own.
Faculty need to dedicate more time to class engagement, management, and semester preparation. Checking discussions can be equivalent to grading hundreds of short essays each day. And messages from students come in all day. All night.
Finally, online education could stand a bit of a human touch.
An authentic “human” interaction is highly valued with our current college audience. This is evidenced in recent surveys conducted by ReGenerations, posted in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Post-Pandemic College Report—of 500 surveyed 18–24 year old students, 72% noted a preference for onsite learning once the pandemic is over.
Of the groups interviewed, the only one fully comfortable with a continuation of the online experience was the generation x audience—a group who has already had a full college experience, and are returning to school to gain new skills needed to expand their career options.
This group prefers the flexibility of the online format, while their children want the previously mentioned resources provided by the college campus experience—the ability to be seen, to have conversations, to talk to a three-dimensional person, and to make connections that will propel them into a successful career.
So what are the takeaways?
First, it looks like online has a lot of issues to overcome, and those issues will be more challenging following the hurried and messy transitions we made in March. But more importantly, while our current student audience is not crazy about online, maybe the real thing they are reacting to is a perception we can overcome.
…more to come in Brave New Worlds…