Ideas for Interactive Online Design Instruction

Distance Learning Curriculum Development

If you are looking for some tips on how to use Blackboard effectively for design instruction, including structuring your course, and tools for interactive group critiques, check out the videos below.

Here’s a great resources list published by AIGA DEC:

If you have content or recommendations for online design instruction, please let us know. We can add it to our Youtube channel, or post it here.

For an open discussion on the topic and your experiences, please join us here…

https://social.designincubation.com/topic/252-teaching-online-resources-experiences-tools-recommendations/

Teaching Online? Please Share Your Experiences

How have you adapted a class or course for remote instruction or online learning?

https://social.designincubation.com/topic/252-teaching-online-resources-experiences-tools-recommendations/

Have you created an online class or entire course? Please share your recommendations and experiences on our bulletin board. Click on the link above to join the discussion.

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If you have questions or recommendations, please let us know at info@designincubation.com.

Is the Future Online Classes?

Teaching methods based on tutorials, cumulative projects, and concept based learning strategies.

Dannell MacIlwraith
Assistant Professor
Kutztown University

More and more colleges and universities are beginning to explore offering traditional studio art and design courses online. At Kutztown University, first year students are required to take an online Digital Foundations course. This course gives a solid grounding in basic computer skills, software knowledge, and visual thinking, a framework for more complex areas of digital media. By giving the flexibility of an online class — students can still have hands-on techniques, experience constructive critique, hand-in physical prints, and have a good mentor/student relationship.

As the curriculum designer, I based my teaching methods on tutorials, cumulative projects, and concept based learning strategies. The short tutorials are designed to maintain attention. I have abandoned the traditional discussion forums of online education, instead utilizing social media for critiquing techniques. Finally, through surveys, quizzes and an ‘artifact’ project the faculty assess Digital Foundations for tweaking and modifying for future sections.

Many colleges and universities are moving classrooms online for financial savings. What are the most effective strategies for teaching art & design online? What about ensuring the same rigor and quality as an in-person course? We’ll explore possible solutions to these problems that are facing the early pioneers of online education in design.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 6.3: Fordham University on May 16, 2020.

Would You Take This Course? A Case Study in Instructional Design

Gerol C. Petruzella Ph.D.
Associate Director
Academic Technology
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts

One of the contexts in which design can have a vital and immediate impact in education is in the design of the online course space. As higher education expands to more meaningfully accommodate the role of instructional design in developing pedagogy and curricula, there is an increasing opportunity for such work to be put into practice, not only in specifically design-focused curricula, but across majors and programs generally. Longstanding research points toward a significant correlation between well-designed environments and improved educational experiences and effectiveness. As digital environments, not just physical ones, have become a mainstream part of the student experience, we have compelling reason to mindfully and intentionally apply design principles to those spaces as a matter of course, rather than as a specialized or ‘add-on’ practice.

This presentation offers a comparative case study in the effectiveness of applying basic considerations of design to an online course space, and offers some preliminary analysis. The same 200-level philosophy course, taught first in 2012 with no explicit attention paid to issues of design, and then taught again in 2015, with intentional consideration of visual, accessibility, web, and mobile design issues, will form the basis of the investigation. Analytics data and trends collected by the learning management system, including direct and proxy measurements of participation, engagement, and assessments, will undergird some conclusions about the efficacy of including intentional and explicit design work as a standard element of course creation.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 3.0: Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) on Saturday, Sept 24, 2016.