Category: Case Studies

Planning and teaching for effective learning (A1, A2, V3)

Contextual Background

In collaboration with a team of academic staff from LCC, I am designing a series of 30-credit online units as part of a MA in Graphic Communication. This set of units will form part of a larger suite of online courses created by UAL Online.

Evaluation

A concern raised by LCC academic staff around the design of the course is the lack of the ‘studio’ and how we might replicate a studio environment online. They also raised concerns about creating a sense of community and trust online.

I want to ensure that we build in opportunities to develop trust amongst students which will encourage authentic collaboration. I want to incorporate social pedagogies of belonging into the course. (Hill and Bunting, 2024) by creating learning experiences that prioritise collaboration and interpersonal connections.

Moving Forwards

This can be achieved by implementing strategies for community building and trust within the teaching and learning approach.

Community Building

It’s important that students are encouraged to collaborate to improve social presence in the course (Garrison, 2000). They should view the online learning space as a risk-free environment where they can express themselves freely. To achieve this, I will incorporate activities that allow students to bring their own real-world experience into the course. For instance, designing a simple activity that asks students to share their reasons for taking a particular unit will help to create a feeling of shared endeavour.

Acknowledging student contribution ensures that students feel that they matter. I want to build in opportunities in the taught curriculum that make students feel heard and valued (Hill and Bunting, 2024). I can build in regular opportunities for tutors to acknowledge individual student contributions throughout each unit. One way to do this is to ask tutors to provide short video feedback on students’ work in progress, either individually or as a group. This approach facilitates feedback and recognition, ensuring that students’ efforts are appreciated by the tutor.

Trust

Building feelings of psychological safety and trust will help to ‘foster a learning environment that supports participants in the challenging work of authentic engagement with regard to issues of identity, oppression, power, and privilege’. (Arao and Clemens, 2021). This can be established through a few simple strategies to start with, such as using clear and accessible English and avoiding the use of jargon as it can be marginalising. I can use the Glossary Tool in Moodle to create an area where unit and discipline-specific key words are defined for students.

I can integrate trust-building activities such as “Tiny Demons: Drawing Monsters” from OneHE. Activities like this can foster self-expression but also mutual understanding and empathy among students, reinforcing the online learning space as a supportive environment where vulnerabilities can be shared without fear, deepening trust within the community.

By prioritising community building and trust during the course design process, I can help the LCC course team by taking the best parts of the in-person studio environment and replicating these online. This approach ensures that each student feels valued and will also help support the LCC academic staff when they deliver the units online.

(516 words)

References

Arao, B. and Clemens, K. (2013) ‘From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: A New Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice’, in The Art of Effective Facilitation: Reflections From Social Justice Educators,. Virginia: Stylus, pp. 135–150.

Bunting, L. and Hill, V. (2024) Belonging Through Compassion. Available at: https://belongingthroughcompassion.myblog.arts.ac.uk/teaching/.

Garrison, D.Randy., Anderson, T. and Archer, W. (2000) ‘Critical Inquiry in a Text-Based Environment: Computer Conferencing in Higher Education’, The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), pp. 87–105. Available at: https://auspace.athabascau.ca/bitstream/handle/2149/739/?sequence=1.

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Knowing and meeting the needs of diverse learners (V1, V3)

Contextual Background:

As part of UAL Online’s work to support the UAL strategy to bring a high-quality creative education to more students than ever before, we are empowering UAL academic staff to master online distance education fundamentals. I design and create asynchronous, self-paced Moodle courses to support this, although encouraging staff to find the time to engage with or complete the courses is challenging.

Evaluation:

As our students are members of UAL staff who do not have the luxury of time due to teaching and other commitments, I need to ensure that the course content is appropriately ‘chunked’ and presented in ‘a manner that encourages learner activities (…) and optimize(s) intellectual performance’ (Sweller, 1998). Spending more time upfront in the design phase to ensure that the learning outcomes of the course are constructively aligned to the learning and assessment activities helps to create an approach to mitigating cognitive overload in online learning. The effectiveness of this approach seems to work well, with staff feedback back that:

“The length of each section works well, and the clarity over what was to come. It was well paced”

Staff feedback

Moving forwards

Another strategy that I have been introduced to is providing opportunities for staff to set goals and reflect. I’m interested in creating a deep approach to learning that helps staff to reflect on what they are doing (Biggs, 1999). Incorporating moments in the course where staff can reflect on ways in which they can integrate flexible and inclusive approaches into their online teaching practice will be beneficial in terms of encouraging this deeper engagement with the course content.

Providing opportunities for staff to set goals and reflect

I want to create space for staff to set goals, share their work and broadly reflect on their experience. To achieve this, I have used the Journal tool in Moodle and included prompts to help with this.

Whilst student feedback indicated that they ‘really liked the journal and the fact that it is stored in Moodle’, I realised that the reflective prompts were mainly focused on struggles or challenges and were predicated on a ‘deficit model’ of reflection. Reading Joy Amulya’s work inspired me to design in opportunities for positive reflection into the course, to create ‘conditions that allow creativity to flourish’ and so that staff can ‘become more purposeful about how to work in more creative and satisfying ways’. (Amulya, 2011). 

In future practice, I will incorporate elements of Strength-Based Design and Appreciative Inquiry theory to include positive prompts that focus on success as part of the Moodle Journal for future staff development courses. Some examples of this might include prompts to help staff identify moments of breakthrough as a result of taking the course, for instance: ‘Reflect on a recent moment where you felt a breakthrough in your online teaching. What led to this breakthrough, and how can you incorporate this learning into your future teaching practice?’

To conclude, implementing reflective practices with positive reflection prompts will hopefully deepen staff’s engagement with course content, emphasising the importance of understanding and responding to staff needs to maintain their engagement and enhance online teaching inclusivity.

(529 words)

References 

Amulya, J. (2011) What is Reflective Practice? https://communityscience.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/What-is-Reflective-Practice.pdf

Biggs, J. (1999) ‘What the Student Does: teaching for enhanced learning’, Higher Education Research & Development, 18(1), pp. 57–75. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0729436990180105.

Sweller, J. (1998). Cognitive architecture and instructional design. Educational Psychology Review, 10(3), 251-296.

Sweller, J. (1988) ‘Cognitive Load during Problem Solving: Effects on Learning’, Cognitive Science, 12(2), pp. 257–285.