🗓️ Wednesday 21 May 2025  🕚 11:00-12:00

• 🔴Theme: Exploring innovative course design and assessment strategies for digital environments

Promoting open sharing of process and work in progress while preserving students’ freedom to learn in the online studio

Jemima Collins

Recording

Abstract

In traditional studio-based creative arts education, the open sharing and critique of messy creative processes and work in progress is considered a standard activity and a fundamental, defining aspect of signature art school pedagogies. The current strategic shift towards fully online provision of creative arts courses and degree programmes, pioneered by institutions such as UAL (University of the Arts London), therefore inevitably involves an endeavour to somehow retain and replicate such practices in an online format. However, attempting to facilitate and enact studio-style process-sharing practices in online environments, while preserving students’ autonomy, wellbeing and right to privacy, poses significant learning design challenges. It arguably also carries the potential risk of overlap between open, supportive and mutually beneficial sharing of creative and reflective practice, and less pedagogically justifiable monitoring and control of students’ activity. Beyond the context of creative arts education, such challenges and risks possess broader relevance in the current educational landscape with the seemingly urgent drive to establish AI-resistant assessment methods, including those which require students to submit developmental or reflective work to evidence their learning process, alongside finalised products or artefacts indicating achievement of outcomes.

This presentation aims to explore the challenges and risks associated with sharing evidence of process and work in progress in online learning environments, and propose principled approaches to addressing them which draw inspiration from the literature on performativity and anonymity in online higher education (Ross, 2011; Bayne et al., 2019) and MacFarlane’s (2017) notion of freedom to learn. It is hoped that the session will prompt pause for thought among digital education designers, developers and practitioners who may be facing similar challenges, and provide practical guidance on devising approaches to process-sharing which empower rather than oppress students and genuinely enrich their creative practices and learning experiences at the same time as meeting academic integrity and assessment requirements.

References

Bayne, S., Connelly, L., Grover, C., Osborne, N., Tobin, R., Beswick, E. & Rouhani, L. (2019) ‘The social value of anonymity on campus: a study of the decline of Yik Yak’, Learning, Media and Technology, 44(2), pp. 92–107.

Macfarlane, B. (2017) Freedom to learn: The threat to student academic freedom and why it needs to be reclaimed. Abingdon: Routledge.

Ross, J. (2011) ‘Traces of self: online reflective practices and performances in higher education’, Teaching in Higher Education, 16(1), pp. 113–126.