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McArthur and McIntyre Present at the Studio Teaching Forum in Hobart

Posted by Simon McIntyre - January 13th, 2010
The Studio Teaching Forum was held in Hobart in December 2009

In December 2009, COFA Online academics Ian McArthur and Simon McIntyre both presented different takes on studio teaching from an online perspectives at the Studio Teaching Forum in Hobart, hosted by the Tasmanian School of Art, the University of Tasmania.

 

Watch the video of Ian McArthur's presentation - Click here -> 

 

The Studio Teaching Forum: Enriching Creative Arts Learning, was a national gathering of art and design studio teachers from higher education institutions from all over Australia, with the purpose of exploring current studio teaching practices, and mapping out effective strategies for the future. The event website describes the gathering thus, "Recognising the core role of studio as foundational to creative arts pedagogy, this forum seeks to explore the ideas and projects undertaken to develop our practice as educators within the broad range of Creative Arts disciplines (including Art, Architecture, Design and the Performing Arts)".

Both Ian and Simon were selected to speak at the conference to share their insights into the role online learning can and will play in the model of creative studio teaching practice.

Simon presented the concept, design and implementation of the fully online design studio, using the fully online Master of Cross-Discipilnary Art and Design as a case study to exemplify the social and collaborative possibilities of working with students from around the world in asynchronous online environments. You can download a copy of the presentation here (note slides only - voiceover was not recorded).

Ian spoke about his involvement in the recent Porosity | Collabor8 project - an international collaborative design studio between China and Australian Universities. This was a really interesting and engaging presentation, so much so that we have made a video of the presentation for viewing, which you can watch here.

 

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COFA Online Present at the Icograda World Design Congress in Beijing

Posted by Simon McIntyre - November 4th, 2009
Ian McArthur and Karin Watson leading a large group discussion following the presentation of their paper at the Icograda World Design Congress in Beijing. Icograda (the International Council of Graphic Design Associations) is the world body for professional communication design.

 

A paper entitled  'Trust and relationship building: critical skills for the future of design education in online contexts' by COFA Online staff Karin Watson, Simon McIntyre and Ian McArthur was one of 16 papers chosen from around the world to be presented at the 2009 Icograda World Design Congress Education Conference in Beijing China.


"Could you trust someone you had never physically met to successfully collaborate with you on a design project?

As online communication technologies rapidly evolve, the creative industries continue to move towards globally networked and interdisciplinary modalities of practice. These inescapable shifts in the ways designers work have challenged many long held assumptions about the nature of individual design processes."

So begins the paper that Karin and Ian recently travelled to China to present to hundreds of designers, educators and design students at the international conference. The paper explores the importance of encouraging trust amongst students in an increasingly online collaborative educational environment, in order to foster successful online collaborative skills. Different COFA case studies were examined from local, global and cross-cultural perspectives. 

Under the theme Xin, the Icograda World Design Congress 2009 in Beijing explored the capacity of design to integrate with other media, to transcend national, cultural and economic confines, and to benefit the design world.  

Read the entire paper here...

 

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COFA Online Wins ALTC Competitive Grant to Help Teachers Learn to Teach Online

Posted by Simon McIntyre - October 30th, 2009
The COFA Online 'Learning to Teach Online' Team

 

COFA Online won  ALTC Competitive Grant funding of $219,000 earlier this year to develop a project called Learning to Teach Online. LTTO, as it is known for short, aims to help all teachers from any discipline to teach online no matter their level of previous experience. You can read all about the project on the COFA Online Gateway website.

It focuses on helping teachers understand the pedagogy behind different forms online learning, and helps them understand why it is important to begin teaching online, as well as how to plan, develop and teach using a series of specially developed, straightforward online 'episodes' comprising a video and a simple 'how to' PDF document.

Each episode will showcase examples of good practice of different forms of online teaching from different disciplines such as art and design, maths, medicine, science and the humanities. They will highlight what can go wrong and offer practical suggestions for how you can keep your online supported learning engaging and effective for your students.

 

The project is nearing the end of the initial planning stages, and the first episodes should be released in early 2010!

  

We are always looking for great examples of  innovative online teaching practice to feature in upcoming episodes. If you are a teacher who has developed a successful online teaching strategy or application we would be happy to hear from you. Please contact us. 

  

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