Dissatisfaction From Students Who Experienced The Adaption Of Design Workshops To Online Classes

The impact of COVID 19 and restrictions on approaches to teaching have resulted in  a better understanding of online learning and its effects on students. Snap  lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 resulted in sudden changes to multimodal teaching  styles and delivery – i.e. blended learning. The obvious practical advantage of online  learning is providing students greater flexibility to arrange and schedule their  learning. However, the benefit of flexibility is not shared by all students. The  intention of this paper is to share the adaptative experience of addressing  challenges of online and blended learning in art and design education. The analysis  of student surveys from 2019 and 2020 for studio-based units, shows that student  satisfaction decreased and a preference for in person classes was voiced. Students  felt disconnected and disengaged when the physical delivery of the units stopped.  This in turn affected their learning experiences, resulting in a high number of late  withdrawals and fails due to non-submission of assessments. Workshop style  teaching is significantly different to traditional lecture-tutorial formats of many  university units in Australia. These workshops encourage learning through making  and doing rather than lecture content delivery and individual assessment. When the  transition to online teaching was needed, these units were delivered through pre recorded lectures that could be viewed asynchronously and live tutorials using video  communication applications. Group work was encouraged through online forums  and breakout rooms in the tutorial time. The constant “presence” of real lecturers  and classroom interaction helped students to recover from the unexpended  interruption in their learning The feedback and observations made by students in  these types of units reveal the problems with adapting teaching styles that  encourage collaboration, conceptualising and making physical artefacts to an online  context as the survey results focussed on their dissatisfaction after the unit was  moved online . Recovery from this period of physical isolation can be repaired by the  return to face-to-face delivery but more thought needs to be given to exploring new  educational pedagogies that prepare us better for future pandemics, natural  disasters or other breakdowns that may disrupt our teaching systems to allow more  successful adaption to online learning.