Abstract:

The Covid pandemic stimulated the artistic education, as did with most of the educational and professional domains, to find viable educational solutions to overcome the constraints and be able to continue to perform their specific educational activities. A case is represented by the Visual Arts Education with activities related to research, creation, communication and evaluation of the artistic works.

During the last two years, the physical locations could no longer be used at their capacity, while the online 2D environments have proven to be limited to support the objectives of the artistic education. Motivated by this challenge, the authors explored alternative e-learning solutions directed to online 3D platforms, by leveraging their existing experience in performing educational scenarios or designing virtual exhibitions on 3D platforms.

In the current paper a modern Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) solution called “Creative Art-Studio” is proposed and discussed. The VLE is implemented on the Mozilla Hubs, a free web-based VR platform, for the use of PhD students and teachers from the National University of Arts (UNA Bucharest), as a blended-learning solution, and in certain conditions, even as a viable alternative to the face-to-face activities and physical art exhibitions.

The technical factors considered were the current technological evolution of 3D virtual platforms, such as graphical capabilities of the current web browsers, seamless navigation, simultaneous presence of sufficient number of participants (circa 20) without a decrease in performance, existing authoring tools and the online repositories of 3D objects, available free or under the Creative Commons license.

Two doctoral students (co-authors of the paper) designed the “Creative Art-Studio” VLE, as a series of virtual spaces, also called “rooms”, that mainly host exhibition of artworks, as students’ doctoral art productions. The VLE supports the interaction and communication among the visitors, thus supporting the exchange of experience, the stage of their process of elaboration as well as the various methodological approaches during their artistic research.

The VLE consists in exhibition halls and workshops with display panels, designed either as private creation spaces for the usage of individual PhD students, or as public spaces dedicated to meetings of PhD students, teachers or other interested persons. All 3D virtual spaces are uploaded in the Mozilla Hubs platform, which also facilitated the access and navigation among and within the virtual spaces. The online virtual environment has been augmented with virtual narratives and guides, to facilitate the understanding of the artistic message, and also hybridized with audio and video communication assets, that can be shared inside and outside the VLE. A group of students and teachers from the Doctoral School of UNA Bucharest agreed to evaluate the usefulness of the VLE from the perspective of the educational and communicational needs.

The paper is organized to provide details on the research motivation, the educational methodology and essential technical aspects that support the VLE implementation, the description of design, usage and experimentation of each virtual space, the results of evaluation as well as the research conclusions.

Keywords:

Visual arts education, artistic research, blended learning, 3D online VLE, Mozilla Hub.