17 September 11:30 Room D107

Hybrid Experiential Learning: Study Abroad Panel

James Mendolia Parsons The New School for Design

Description

I will introduce a hybrid study-abroad course I developed for Parsons. It successfully allows onsite and online students the opportunity to apply skills learned in their academic program to a real world context. In particular, it familiarizes them with Italy’s fashion industry. Online pre-coursework allows students to study from various parts of the world and engage in lectures and discussions that address social, economic and political topics related to Italy as key player in the global marketplace. A two-week onsite excursion to select cities allows students to further explore Italian culture, fashion, customs, and international business practices. Direct experience learning supported by technology creates a unique learning environment.

Interaction

As with any class I teach or presentation I give I ask the audience to ask questions about student experiences. I also ask them to share the challenges they face teaching a distance learning course.

Takeaway

My goal is two-fold, first, to encourage other universities to use technology to explore new methods of global education and independent studies. Second, engage faculty attending Designs on eLearning Conference in discussions that nurture cross-disciplinary exchanges and foster external projects between universities.

Outcomes

I will write an overview of the Designs on eLearning Conference and include the story in the Parsons online magazine.

Newsfeed: using Facebook and Workflow to support remote peer-to-peer instruction

Natascha Radclyffe-Thomas London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London

The prevalence of social media in our daily lives has blurred the boundaries between formal and informal education and impacted students’ expectations of communication with and within educational institutions (Joosten, Pasquini & Harness, 2013). However the myth of Prensky’s (2001) ‘digital native’ often results in misunderstandings around students’ facility with digital technologies and furthermore about the ability to engage with these technologies in pedagogically meaningful ways (Radclyffe-Thomas, 2012). In language learning research Byram (2009: 211) tells us that by merely ‘experiencing’ different cultures one cannot necessarily expect someone to become ‘intercultural’. Adopting a similar position, it can be argued that the introduction of e-learning technologies into the curriculum does not in itself guarantee effective engagement in digital spaces, from either students or teachers.

The pedagogic literature on student engagement supports the facility of intrinsic motivation (Collins & Amabile, 1999; Ryan & Deci, 2000) and peer interaction (Junco, 2012; Mazur, 2013) in our learning spaces, yet teacher identity often supports transmission methods of instruction and the potential for peer interactions to occur in a digital rather than physical space is yet to be fully explored in our industrial-age universities. Students engage in informal education facilitated through social media outside the classroom walls, yet there is often resistance to its introduction in the academic space.

This presentation reviews a two-stage international collaborative project which uses the Facebook platform to facilitate curricular collaboration between nearly 200 students in Europe and Asia. Reflections of the success of an initial pilot study in 2013-14 led to an enhanced digital collaboration extended to include a third student cohort and thus students at London College of Fashion, City University Hong Kong and Lasalle College of the Arts Singapore worked on parallel projects exploring local and international fashion brands and researching the viability of potential geographic extensions.

The collaboration was also extended in terms of an increase in student-generated content with LCF students working in small groups using the Workflow platform to collaborate with their classmates, and the introduction of more specific contact points between each international cohort, including e-introductions, peer critiques and shared online resources. Whilst still extremely effective in terms of enhanced learning opportunities and raising of intercultural awareness, challenges were identified around choice of digital platforms, differential participation, the feasibility of running asynchronous assignments and levels of staff engagement, and this presentation gives a summary of both the benefits and challenges of engaging staff and students in digital spaces.

Online Reflective Interactions: Social Network Sites in Studio Education

Simge Hough University of Southampton

Design studio course is the core of design education. In studio classes, teachers assign projects to students and teach them how to design by demonstrating “reflection-in-action” (Schön, 1987). Learning and teaching take place in a reflective social environment, where “students learn to become practitioners through learning-by-doing” (Shao et al., 2007). “Studio critique”, the means by which teachers and students reflect, is defined as the basic unit of interaction and communication in the social environment of studio (Schön, 1987). In this study, in order to address the issues related to “reflective interactions”, an online environment is proposed to be used parallel to the studio course as a supplement to the interaction and communication processes between teachers and students. Previous studies show that teachers and students do not get into free exchange of ideas in online social environments, as intended (Craig and Zimring, 2000).

In order to engage teachers and students in an online environment for exchanging ideas, the use of an online platform, which corresponds to the processes of design studio course, and is familiar and easy-to-use for teachers and students, is suggested. Along these lines, it is proposed that social network sites, which are the current and common online platforms of social interaction and communication (boyd and Ellison, 2008), can be taken as examples. As a means of testing how social network site structures can be used by teachers and students in a design studio setting, a three-cycle action research scheme was conducted.

In this scheme, online social network sites were used parallel to the processes of a number of industrial design studio courses. Interviews and questionnaires were held with teachers and students of these studio courses, to identify the specific limitations of the actual and physical conditions of the studio course in terms of reflective interactions, which fell under five topics: temporal, physical, archival, relational and hierarchical. Upon implementation, the network sites were subjected to content analysis, which was accompanied by questionnaires with teachers and students, to find out if and how the use of these online platforms addressed the issues stated by teachers and students.

The analysis of the findings of the study supported Craig and Zimring’s research pointing to the lack of free exchange of ideas between all teachers and students, even though fragments of such processes of interaction and communication were observed. In addition, the results showed that, when used regularly, the sites functioned as an archive of both students’ works and also the critiques exchanged by teachers and students. It was also found out that the sites provided direct connections between everybody in the studio by visualising the interrelations and making the interactions more accessible and transparent. Finally, it is evident that within the more “connected” world of today, by detaching the interaction processes from space and time, these online environments offer new ways of supplementing communication within the design studio in a global scale.