Month: December 2018

For this review, I wanted to test a few key components to gauge how easily students are able to access the course. I asked my husband to try to navigate the course without any instruction from me, his goal was to find everything needed to be prepared for the first class meeting at the end of week 1. As he looked through the course I had him describe what he was clicking on, why, and how easy it was to find what he was looking for. As a student at MSU, he is fairly familiar with D2L already so it was pretty simple for him to figure out.

• Welcome Message/professor contact info.
• Syllabus
• Course Schedule
• Discussion Post 1
• Project 1.1
• Slides for 1.1
• Grades

He was able to find everything within a matter of a few minutes. The only aspect that was somewhat difficult was finding the discussion post because he has never used that feature of D2L before. This made me realize that I should add directions on my course schedule on how to navigate to the discussions. Overall, by conducting this review I feel satisfied that the course is fairly clear and straight forward to navigate. Because the course is a hybrid format, I will be able to walk them through any difficulties and answer questions as a group during the first class session. If for some reason the course didn’t meet the first week, I could always create a screencast to show students how they should navigate their way through the course and find everything they need. Another way to better gauge the usability would be to conduct another review with an individual that has never used D2L before, which is something I would consider before I teach this course in the future.

Course accessibility Review

In following the MSU web accessibility guide when creating my course materials, I believe my course is fairly accessible for students of all levels and abilities. My documents all have strong contrast between text and background, images within the project sheets have alternative text, and files have been uploaded as rtf word documents rather than pdf’s to make them accessible to students using screen readers. I made sure to avoid the use of tables, and all lists are clearly denoted using bullet points. One area that could use improvement would be my slideshows, which I plan to give more energy to in the future. Because I did not have enough time this semester to screencast my lectures, they do not provide as much benefit to the course as I would have hoped. In the future I plan to add alt text to all of the images, as well as provide a transcript to go along with the lectures. This semester allowed me to get a good start on developing my color and design hybrid course, but in order to provide maximum accessibility I will need to put more effort into supplying students with multiple avenues for multimedia content.

Elements of an Engaging Learning Space

Learning spaces can take many forms, whether it be in a traditional classroom setting, non-academic environment, or a digital platform, there are certain ways to create engaging spaces for students to succeed and take ownership of their learning. In order for this to happen, I strongly believe that a learning space should offer the following:

1. Clear communication and expectations
2. Room for discussion and collaboration
3. Space for individual exploration
4. Accessible resources and materials

In combination, these elements promote an authentic experience for students to engage with one another and further their learning through active discussion and exploration. I’ve experienced many classroom situations like these within studio art settings. The nature of the studio environment generally promotes individual exploration within a community of students, offering plenty of room for open dialogue between students and instructor to learn from one another. It is very possible to recreate these conditions within a variety of formats outside of the studio environment, but would manifest differently depending on the physical or digital format of the course.  I am excited to see the challenges and opportunities to promote engagement within the hybrid classroom structure.

 

Action Research Proposal

INTRO

Virtual reality has the ability to alter the way we understand and interact with our surroundings. I’m interested in looking at how VR drawing may affect student’s perception and understanding of space within the drawing classroom. In essence, observational drawing consists of perceiving and translating information from actual space into a flat space, and I would like to find out if VR drawing may have a positive impact on how students make these connections.

QUESTION

Does virtual reality drawing (in actual space) help students better understand the perception and translation of space on a 2-dimensional page?

REVIEW OF LITERATURE

There is quite a bit of research on virtual reality and its connection between various disciplines; however, I have not found anything addressing the specific question about the connection to observational drawing. According to Águeda Simó“in his article The Virtual Reality Art Installation Endocytosis: Evolving from a Flat Land into a Three-dimensional World, “Virtual Reality is an ideal platform for exploring spatial effects because of their ability to combine stereo imaging techniques and interactive real-time graphics”. Exploring space (both optical and actual) is a major goal of Drawing 1, so there are overlapping themes between the two platforms that are very intriguing to study. My work would help to fill these gaps within literature that currently exists on the topic of virtual reality.

METHODS

I will first need to administer a pre-assessment to my students to gauge their drawing abilities prior to their VR drawing experience. This pre-assessment will take place within the first 3 weeks of the Spring 2019 semester. After this time, I will have a solid understanding of the students drawing abilities, as well as their rate of progress so far in the course.

After the 3rd week, students will meet in the Virtual Reality room in the Digital Scholarship Lab at Michigan State University to draw in virtual reality for one class session. This activity will allow students to engage their entire bodies, and actively move through space while creating their drawings.

As class resumes as normal, I will make observations about how/if the VR drawing experience impacted the quality or accuracy of their  2-dimensional drawings. We will discuss as a class to see how the different drawing experiences impacted or affected one another. We may even go to the VR room at a second time in the semester to see if that provides any additional ways of understanding and translating space.

CONSTRAINTS

This study will occur within the constraints of my STA 110 Drawing 1 course in Spring 2019. Because there are only 18 students enrolled in the course, it is a fairly small sample from which to determine conclusive results. The students will likely come from a variety of backgrounds and levels of experience with drawing, which may also sway the findings. Students with less drawing experience may demonstrate more growth throughout the duration of the course than students entering the class with a high level of skill. The pre-assessment will be necessary in determining growth for all students in the class, leading to more accurate results of the VR study.

 

RESULTS

I’m interested in determining what, if any, connections exist between the translation and perception of drawing through virtual reality and on a 2-dimensional plane. If there is a positive connection between the two, I would expect to see a noticeable improvement of accuracy and depiction of space within my student’s observational drawings after week 4. If there are no noticeable differences after week 4, it’s possible that either the students need more time with VR drawing, or there is no noticeable connection between the two activities.

OTHER RELEVANT INFORMATION

STA 110 is a class based on observational drawing, so students will be building these skills throughout the semester. I expect all students will demonstrate growth, so it may be difficult to determine if the VR experience played a major role in the amount of growth or not. I think an additional survey or discussion with students to hear their thoughts about the experience will be helpful in knowing the full impact of the study.

 

Course Quality Analysis

Color & Design: Hybrid course

Overall, my course meets the majority of the elements on the Quality Matters (QM) program rubric for course quality. For the first time developing an online or hybrid course, I think it is expected that I would have many areas to develop and improve upon. Using this rubric allowed me to gain an objective overview of the course, and visualize areas of strength and areas that could use improvement. Strengths of the course include clear and direct communication about the structure, purpose, objectives and requirements asked of students, which are important components to any classroom environment. The areas in which my course showed weakness, were areas that I feel were more specific to an online or hybrid platform that I hadn’t previously thought about. Working through this rubric allowed me to gain insight into areas that need further development, such as explicitly stating etiquette expectations, stating the minimum technology requirements, providing a link to technical support as well as offering course materials in diverse and widely accessible formats. Several of these components are simple fixes that can be easily worked in to my existing course materials. Expectations for proper etiquette is something typically addressed during a traditional face-to-face class, and is generally a very informal conversation about how to interact with others in the classroom setting. In the online environment; however, everything becomes more formalized through writing, and the instructor must think ahead so that students know exactly what is expected of them. This evaluation process was a great way to find specific ways in which my course could be improved and I plan on implementing these changes to improve the experience students have taking my course in the future.