The Hybrid Design Studio: An Experiment

Description

Teaching a course for the first time is somehow an experiment in articulating learning objectives with instructional design while inquiring on the future of design education. It involves testing approaches, methods, and ideas on how teaching and learning design responds to changing contexts of design practice. More importantly, it involves looking at curricular design as an ongoing iterative project that questions the present to imagine the future of education.

Takeaway

The takeaway for the session will be strategies and reflections on how to create an integrated and cohesive learning experience when mixing face-to-face and online learning in design education. In addition, an engaged and dynamic dialog about the learning experiences of students as collected via surveys in a hybrid mode course are presented.

Abstract

The design studio is the traditional physical space for teaching and learning design. The experiential learning that happens in studio-based courses enable students to engage in reflective practice through making, exploring ideas, and interacting with professors and other students. Studio projects are signature to design pedagogy. These are often proposed as class exercises where students test or practice specific skills or projects where students engage in a long-term effort to answer a brief, resolve a design problem, or respond to a prompt. When imagining the design studio in the realm of online learning is difficult to envision the high level of student engagement that the design studio permits. How can a design course be taught to bring together the most meaningful methods of both pedagogical modes? This paper reports on the planning, design, and delivery of a hybrid-mode, 6-week information design course taught in Summer 2019.

In hybrid pedagogical spaces, face-to-face learning is blended with online learning. In such environments, design students can build and experience a culture of learning through augmented interactions but without completely replacing the traditional studio. The hybrid mode course also allows experimenting with diverse methods of engagement fueled by the students' digital identities in the use of selected software tools and platforms for online communication. When losing face-to-face contact, one challenge is how to create high levels of participation and sense of community in design students when engaging in asynchronous learning. The face-to-face design studio can conceptually be a space devoid of the mediation of the computer in contrast to the virtual space as a computer-mediated environment.

In this presentation, I examine hybrid pedagogy as more than the integration of the two delivery modes. Through the design of a hybrid course framed by the changing nature of the place of learning, we can create a dialog between virtual and physical spaces where students have agency and engage in reflective critical practice. The online environment can be a space to augment the learning experience and not just a repository for course content. In the context of a commuter campus and collecting student feedback, this presentation also inquires in ways of delivering the curriculum that responds to the student's circumstances.