PERFECTING THE BLEND FOR EFFECTIVE AND ENGAGING ART AND DESIGN EDUCATION

The challenge in teaching art and design courses is that the instructors must concurrently teach both soft and hard design skills. Soft design skills—aesthetics, intuition, design principles, balance, recognizing harmony in page design, etc., are emotive parts of design. Technical or hard design skills give form to students' ideas either in print or digital media. In summation, soft design skills are a creative analysis of ideas, and hard design skills are the technical implementation of ideas. If instructors focus on teaching either soft or hard design skills, it is usually at the expense of the other skill set.

Soft design skills are best taught in a face-to-face meeting where students can interact, observe, create and critique. In contrast, hard design skills are taught best in an environment that lends itself well to practice, repetition and learning by doing—eLearning facilitates that. Hence a hybrid of face-to-face teaching and eLearning is required for effective art and design education.

While researching available eLearning options for art and design, like www.lynda.com it was found that they only offer passive learning. The presenter started to explore ways in which one could create interactive tutorials that simulate software and make the learning process engaging. A research project to develop the same was funded by the University of Wisconsin System’s Emerging Technologies Grant in 2009-10. The immersive components developed during the project were implemented in courses in 2010. Since then they have been constantly improved as per student and peer feedback. The presenter also started using social media and VoIP services to augment the eLearning components and achieve a balanced blend in his courses. The results have been astounding. Perfecting blended learning has resulted in creating a balance between teaching hard and soft design skills. Having balanced skills is helping students perform better in the classroom as well as in their workplace. The overall quality of education as well as the quality/quantity of student learning and student work has elevated.

The presentation will share information regarding the techniques that the presenter has implemented to ‘perfect the blend’ and make the learning experience more successful. It will also showcase the innovative eLearning simulations that the presenter uses in his classes. The participants will learn how to create equilibrium between face-to-face and eLearning formats in their blended courses. They will also learn, how to harness the potential of social media to improve teaching and learning, while being mindful of privacy concerns.