Thoughts on an Engaged Online Arts Education

Ever Flatter

Artists have always sought to communicate their views of the world, and they’ve always used whatever tools they possess to share that vision.? From the earliest paintings on cave walls, to today’s viral videos on TikTok, those who have the impulse to create will do so, no matter what resources they have. ?While time has moved forward, and our creative impulses have become more sophisticated, the heart of all creation is the impulse to leverage tools to say something, and to share it with others. ?

The same is true for teachers; we teach with whatever we have at hand. Historically, our students have mimicked the techniques we’ve shared with them, learning basic competencies first. ?They eventually move past us to become their own masters. ?This is how we have progressed as artists (and humans), passing our knowledge and the creative impulse from generation to generation, constantly looking for ways to innovate and broaden the reach of our messages and ourselves.

Today, the potential breadth of any message is greater than ever. ?As Thomas Friedman noted, everything is more easily shared today because our modes of transit and communication are flattening the world. ?Like the business Friedman was talking about, artists too have become less and less limited by geography and local resources, and the number of followers (or students) that can learn about their work has dramatically increased.

As the tools used to create and produce work were all becoming increasingly digital, it only made sense that beginning in the early 1990s, an early version of online learning would evolve as teachers began to think differently about our potential for reaching new audiences and new students. ?Far from its historical roots in mail-based education, almost all institutions are now using some version of online learning to augment or even replace traditional face-to-face interactions.

However, to be clear, online learning in the arts has been slower to evolve than other disciplines. ?Many reasons exist for this slowness: some of them have to do with the limits of technology, such as finding an experiential equivalent to working with traditional tools and practices; and some of them have to do with the media itself, such as what technology may exist (or not) that can adequately express the artist’s intent; and some limits are also imposed by conventional assumptions about what media are a part of legitimate study in the arts.

Filling the gaps of all the above, informal online learning has progressed outside of formal structures. ?Free or inexpensive online art tutorials of all sorts are just a click or two away from anyone who is interested. ?While this essay will not comment on the quality of these tutorials as learning experiences, the point is made here to suggest that there is a public demand for content, and the followers of that content have been hungrily consuming it.

Ever Learning

To ensure that any learning is effective, a scaffolded pedagogy and the assessment of progress are essential. ?This is the stuff of education. ?Our role as educators is to offer learning experiences in a model that ensures students will develop and build sufficient skills, aptitudes, and attitudes necessary to eventually manage their own learning. ?But why is this so challenging online, and what’s the real reason that teaching online in the arts lags other subject areas? First, to understand the answers to these questions, we need to explore the fundamental elements of spaces, subjects, and schedules that are the building blocks of our basic educational models:

Spaces

In traditional face-to-face learning environments, spaces are built, defined, and used in a manner consistent with the subject (or media) being taught, and the ability of a teacher to manage the activities of the learners to focus on that subject. ?The idea that a space would serve its purpose is a good one, and a certain level of specialization is desirable. ?However, unless there is a specific health or safety reason associated with the creation of a space and the activities that occur there, spaces can often become too specialized, restrict the kind of people that can participate, and ultimately fail to serve a broader model for relevant, contextualized learning. ?This idea is even more pronounced when the space created is a virtual one, where the online experience needs to be as accommodating as possible to allow for a broad variety of options in the exploration of (and the solutions to) any given problem.

Subjects

Subject matter areas and courses are traditionally created in line with the expertise of the faculty. This makes it easier for those faculty to organize information, develop prerequisite content, scaffold the learning, and evaluate student success. ?The creation of subjects and courses in schools also allows for groups of students to be assigned to a faculty member, all of whom benefit at some level from that one-on-one relationship and a focus on content. ?However, while courses that allow for in-depth study and specialization may be beneficial within a professional context later, subject specialization too early gets into unnecessary levels of detail and creates a lack of time elsewhere (see schedules below) which often prevents the material from being contextualized with other information. ?This can lead to the student learning very detailed information isolated from other content areas that might be historically, visually, or expressively relevant. ?In online learning, subject specialization without acknowledging the opportunity for the interconnectedness of content can limit students in the same way.

Schedules

Schedules have been historically created to organize the work of teaching to allow for consistent compensation of faculty and the regularized evaluation of student learning over discrete periods of time. ?With the latter, even though it’s less obvious than the bookkeeping needed to generate faculty paychecks, schedules essentially serve accounting functions that allow administrators to sort and assess easily, from which certain assumptions about student progress can be made. ?However, because student learning is often physically segregated (by the spaces) and topically segregated (by the subjects), the schedule can feel arbitrary. Further it creates barriers in our ability to measure summative learning. ?This disaggregation of time, place, and content creates a fragmentation of the learning experience that impacts students’ abilities to synthesize and make their learning meaningful and relevant. ?Again, this experience can be heightened with the online learning models that are insensitive to the need to connect content in a way that contextualizes the experience.

As Sir Ken Robinson put it, most cultures have become very good at creating industrialized models of education based on the assumption that such industrial efficiency is a good thing. ?Yet as any artist will tell you, these historical models have never served traditional arts education very well, and any hope that online learning would revolutionize our approach to teaching art is still too often driven by notions that such an experience can be (or should be) consistent with efficiencies and economies of scale. ?For the arts, it’s like putting a square peg into a round hole, because (in the name of efficiency) online models are often seeking to replicate the efficiencies of the same historical models above, that is, of spaces, subjects, and schedules.

For the arts, the outcomes with online education are often worse that other discipline areas. Why is this? ?In one word, it’s about engagement, or the lack thereof.

Ever Engaging

Engagement has always been the secret ingredient in teaching art in traditional models. ?It has had this capacity to make a difference because engagement bridges space, subject, and schedule gaps. ?In over-specialized spaces, engagement of the faculty can encourage students to bring in any outside elements they need to explore other techniques, or to synthesize experiences and knowledge beyond the limits of the space. ?Similarly, faculty can connect students with other subject matter areas that are relevant to a student’s expressive need and personal experience. ?And last, the longer engagement opportunity provided in critique (outside of a formal assessment schedule) can help the student realize the value of failure and the redemptive potential of an iterative approach.

So, the arts have always benefited from direct one-on-one engagement to transfer technical skills and motivate content exploration, and from that, have used critical reflection on both skill and content development to measure success. ?What we haven’t really found is a way to replicate this kind of engagement online. ?Evidence of this poor translation of engagement from traditional courses to online learning was never more evident than in the spring of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the world, and teachers and students were forced to work remotely with almost no notice. ?Faculty, some without any experience teaching online, were suddenly thrust into delivering remote versions of their coursework, and the compensatory engagement practices that they’d counted on with face-to-face interactions were seriously compromised in the online versions of the courses they created.

At the college and university level, as a result of the pandemic, enrollments suddenly declined. ?Some schools reported that in the semester following the onset of the pandemic’s initial lockdowns, they saw the largest enrollment declines in over a decade, with some reporting drops of up to 8%. ?In the arts, where the direct mentorship model and this idea of engagement is a critical part of a student’s ability to progress, students dropped out in record numbers. ?In fact, enrollments dropped more than 10% at even some of the more prestigious art and design schools, and for many other schools, it was even worse.

With the eventual wane of the pandemic, we can all look forward to students returning to campuses to directly engage their faculty. ?That would certainly be welcome, but we also need to be thinking about what we can do to be creative with a new model of online education that isn’t bound by some of the pedagogical assumptions of the past, while it simultaneously anticipates other potential disruptions in the future. ?After all, online education is not going away. ?As the technology to deliver more effective instructional design solutions grow, the arts need to grow with them, all while keeping in mind that our secret to success is the engagement model.

Ever Different

So, without dedicating ourselves to becoming instructional designers, what can we as teachers in the arts learn from the recent pandemic? ?And what has the situation that’s been forced upon us, revealed to us as an opportunity to address the flaws within our current versions of online learning that have never translated well to arts education?? To start, we must admit that artists are different. ?Not just admit it, embrace it and recognize that our engagement with students is the key to our success. ?We also need to look at the online tools we’ve been using a little differently. ?A learning management system, or LMS, is still too often seen as a vehicle for delivering content versus a tool for mediating an experience.? The idea that the LMS would become a platform for mediating creativity requires the faculty to be creative as well, but also to have a flexible framework for organizing solutions that can accommodate a wide variety of subjects and learning styles.

So, what are some of the minimum standards we should expect when teaching creatives online, and what are the best practices associated with ensuring that the engagement element is maintained as the priority for defining success? ??Let’s look at the prior list of elements (spaces, subjects, and schedules) in a Venn Diagram and apply an engagement lens to explore the affinities each might have for the others below:

Regardless of technical abilities or understanding of learning theories in instructional design, this is a framework for creating better engagements that use the LMS to keep students involved in the experience and able to advance their learning; and, as important, offer students and faculty a common digital ground in which there is a high degree of flexibility to the teaching and learning captured there.?

Ever Compliant

Formal education is a highly regulated enterprise with a variety of external compliance-related organizations, such as accreditors and other government entities, all invested in measuring effectiveness.? Therefore, in building engagement in a variety of course delivery modes (and some might say regardless of delivery mode), a basic understanding about what an engaging technology-mediated experience would look like is helpful for any institution.? Such understanding, aligned with compliance standards and framed by a cogent rationale, can help guide an institution’s faculty and administrators in coming up with instruction that can be consistently mediated by the LMS in a manner that both demonstrates and documents an institution’s effectiveness in promoting student learning.?? Regardless of regulatory entity (the external compliance stakeholders), and regardless of course modality (the institution’s internal delivery models), the following standards can universally apply to all teaching and learning scenarios.? They should be the basis for considering how an engaging LMS-mediated experience would look like, all in a manner that would meet what most compliance organizations refer to as substantial equivalence concerns.

Content

To build successful online or hybrid courses which are the substantial equivalents of their traditional face-to-face counterparts, the course’s content must be capable of generating comparable student artifacts and other materials that can be measured in assessing student learning outcomes.? In other words, on-ground courses and online courses (and any hybrid version that lies on the continuum in-between) must have content that is sufficiently similar. ?And, in the evaluation of those courses’ outcomes, there should be no discernible difference in the quality of the student work submitted.? Last, to meet substantial equivalency thresholds, an outside evaluator looking at the teaching or the learning content should not be able to tell what mode of delivery was used in teaching the course.

Contact

Traditional academic accounting is based on what’s called a contact hour model, measuring the time that a faculty member is in front of the students.? Prompted by the growth of online learning, and accelerated by the pandemic, there has been a proliferation of alternative models developed by many institutions in line with new flexibility offered by accreditors.? Institutions that develop alternatives to the contact hour model are still obligated to demonstrate substantial equivalence of their courses and programs, and often the best way to make the equivalence argument is for the institution to develop careful standards for a) what constitutes contact time and all its variations, and b) how those variations support similar student outcomes.

Context

Probably one of the most frustrating aspects of teaching is convincing younger learners of the value of the content (in whatever form it takes) and the value of the contact (however it is defined).? Solving this larger problem of building value by understanding of relevance through context and consequent enthusiasm for learning, requires teachers to think differently.? While teaching courses that are often the disparate and disaggregated elements of a larger curriculum, the faculty need to remember to constantly think about their courses relative to the end-goal. ?Faculty generally have a summative way of looking at learning, but their students don’t.? So, as part of a larger effort to make content more engaging, faculty should frequently state (and re-state) the relevant context for their teaching and the context for the student’s work.

A substantial equivalence argument can be made on the idea of engagement as the glue that holds a course together regardless of its delivery mode, especially with the use of regular summaries that tie work to the courses’ objectives and the larger program outcomes.? These summaries (or previews) should read less like a laundry list of things to do within any given course and read more like an aspirational story that ties all learning back to the larger objectives, for the course and program, so that the student is able to contextualize the purposes for which all their work is being done.? Let’s look at this list of elements (content, contact and context) in another Venn Diagram and apply a substantial equivalence lens to explore the affinities each might have for the others below:

While it could be argued that the following list of best practices would be effective engagement tools for teaching in all disciplines and in all modalities, the imperative for the engagement element within the arts makes these ideas ever more critical for success in the online education experience.

On Content: Faculty across the departments of an organization should build a common vision for the curricula and their courses, such that there is a unified understanding about what sort of teaching content and student outcomes can be expected regardless of course delivery mode.? Opportunities include:

• Agreements on standardized course descriptions, objectives, and outcomes that align with a cogent program philosophy.
• Building and assessing artifact repositories that articulate links between project expectations in line with course and program outcomes.

On Contact: Faculty should understand and leverage the value of the LMS as an engagement-mediation tool for all students, regardless of course modality, so that faculty/student contact can be enhanced.? Opportunities include:

• Standardized definitions on types of contact that meet institution and compliance expectations and alternatives by which faculty contact time can be measured.
• Contact in all modes is predicated on the idea of maximizing engagement, with regular feedback systems for students and their work, generating equivalent results regardless of course modality.

On Context: Faculty should post regular summaries that persistently refer to the larger objectives for the course so that students are able to contextualize the purpose for all the work being done.? Opportunities include:

• Project briefs, weekly summaries and other context-building engagements that clearly link the work students are doing to course and program outcomes
• Grading criteria are clearly linked to course objectives and outcomes and weighted in such a fashion as to establish priorities for the value of students’ work

To conclude, while online learning in the arts has been slower to evolve than other disciplines, for all the reasons previously noted, engagement is the key to our success in the future.? And as technology’s ability to facilitate that engagement has improved, the chance for looking at art education as an online-mediated experience improves significantly.

About Kevin Conlon:

Kevin Conlon is currently the Chair of the ARTS department at San Antonio College. He has served as a faculty member and administrator at art and design schools for more than 25 years, with leadership posts as Dean of Undergraduate Studies at Savannah College of Art and Design from 2004 to 2008, Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Ringling College of Art and Design from 2008 to 2011, and Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost for Columbus College of Art and Design from 2011 to 2016.

Conlon holds a BFA from University of South Alabama and an MFA from Ohio State University. He maintains his studio practice with sculptural works in concrete, bronze, cast resin, clay, and fiberglass.

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