Recipe: Make crisis your curriculum

If you’re a design educator who is/has been a practitioner, how many times did you have a perfect submission deadline? One you completed well in advance with no last minute panics? No last minute plotter ink running out? Hard drive packing up with that 1.1GB PS file? Never? Feel free to post in the commentsContinue reading “Recipe: Make crisis your curriculum”

Recipe: Motivating students working remotely

By Georgy Holden, Senior Lecturer in Design, The Open university Keeping students engaged and motivated is crucial at a distance – especially to avoid last-minute panics with assignments and projects. Research shows that distance students more than any other group are particularly sensitive to external factors and life events. But it also reveals that regular,Continue reading “Recipe: Motivating students working remotely”

Recipe: Online Whiteboard Tutorial

Finding appropriate online meeting spaces for design students can be tricky. Design is not a 1-many, purely didactic, or content-driven subject. What happens in a tutorial is emergent, constructionist learning – it very much depends on what is presented and the tuition session, therefore, has to respond to this. In a studio, we often doContinue reading “Recipe: Online Whiteboard Tutorial”

Some academic work on Distance Design Education

There isn’t much research into distance design education and what does exist tends to be informal and/or case study based. This is slowly changing as both design and education research has matured and developed over the past few decades. The excerpts in this post are draft versions of work in progress exploring Virtual Design StudiosContinue reading “Some academic work on Distance Design Education”

Questions from a design lecturer

In this post we try to respond to a few real questions asked by a (real!) faculty member having to (really quite urgently) move to distance and online methods. I’ll be holding online office hours in 1 hour. Not sure how to do that…  Have a look at our post on staying connected. Your emergencyContinue reading “Questions from a design lecturer”

Distance and online design education – a (not so) quick introduction

This is a cross-post from http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/design/distance-and-online-design-education-a-not-so-quick-introduction/ This is a quick post after a few online discussions and question around how to start with distance (and online) design education – thanks to @ZhenpingLiow, @_p_antonio and others). It’s a quick summary of a few key concepts and ideas for any design teachers or tutors needing to thinkContinue reading “Distance and online design education – a (not so) quick introduction”