{"id":943,"date":"2016-01-22T14:30:51","date_gmt":"2016-01-22T22:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/hybridflc\/?p=943"},"modified":"2016-01-22T14:30:51","modified_gmt":"2016-01-22T22:30:51","slug":"peer-to-peer-technical-help-and-design-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/hybridflc\/2016\/01\/22\/peer-to-peer-technical-help-and-design-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Peer-to-peer technical help and design review"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Response to “Five Common Pitfalls of Online Course Design:\u00a0#5: Ignore the ways students learn from each other<\/i>“<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The course I’m redesigning covers\u00a0 3D modeling, including 2D and 3D design, color, lighting, and spatial narrative. This is a 4 credit course that meets 2 times each week. In that time, it is a real challenge to spend sufficient time on the core design concepts while also introducing the software (Maya). As I mentioned in our first meeting, one way to improve this situation is to assign on-line tutorials for basic skills\u00a0training. That is\u00a0already helping to free up class time. For the first time I’ve also started a discussion board for students to share and assist with technical problems. This is taking much pressure off of me to be the software guru and is encouraging students to work with each other. They spend countless hours outside of class time working side by side in the computer lab, so facilitating online collaboration is a natural extension. I plan to expand on this, once I see the results of the current trial run.<\/span><\/p>\n

One area I have not experimented with is on-line peer review. I’ve spent many class sessions in art classes, both as a student and an instructor involved in critiques. In art school students are trained in this method early in their studies, and learn appropriate ways to give and receive feedback, without being insulting, and hopefully, without taking the comments personally. (That’s often difficult when work is a form of deeply personal expression.) For many of my students, this is the first design class, and formal critique is unfamiliar. The last thing I want to do is discourage or embarass students who are unaccustomed to having their work reviewed in front of the class. For that reason I am very gentle with in-class critiques. On rare occasion I bring the rest of the class into the conversation, but I keep that to a minimum, partially due to concern for feelings, but more significantly because it takes so much class time. This means that the main way students are getting honest critique is through emails or personal meetings with me. The meetings are far more productive, and I can phrase my critiques\u00a0in ways that are supportive, gauging my comments in part on their verbal responses and body language. Some may find this approach far too gentle and accommodating, but I’ve seen “non artists” be very discouraged when unaccustomed to what they\u00a0perceive\u00a0as a harsh assessment of their work.\u00a0The challenge is that providing this personalized face-to-face critique is time consuming and difficult to schedule. Yet trying to retain that level of sensitivity in e-mail communications is difficult, even for me, given how easy it is to misinterpret written\u00a0messages. The end result of all of this is that I\u2019m not providing as much critique as I\u2019d like to.<\/span><\/p>\n

I like the idea of bringing critique to on-line discussions since it would allow for a much greater range of feedback than I’m able to provide in or outside of class time. How useful that critique is depends on the ability of other students to assess the work. I feel confident that they can learn to assess work in a constructive way. My greater concern is the sense of personal attack. If I struggle to be sensitive in writing, I can only imagine how that’s going to be for students, particularly when I look at the flaming comments people often post on blogs. Many people can be outright insulting and cruel in their assessment of other people’s comments, as we all know. I had a real challenge in my MFA program with discussion boards. There were many misinterpretations, \u00a0and some people felt that they were being insulted and attacked. This is in a group of sensitive people trained in critique! So this is really my primary dilemma. Successful online critique would be very useful to students and would free up class time. Unsuccessful online critique could be unhelpful, very discouraging, and could drive students away from the online peer-to-peer experience entirely. Worse, it could shut them down creatively.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Back to the central question:\u00a0<\/span>How will I avoid this pitfall in my hybrid course?\u00a0<\/i>The answer is,\u00a0I don\u2019t know.\u00a0I\u00a0understand and support the concept, but\u00a0I\u2019m wary of this approach, and don\u2019t know how\u00a0I can implement it successfully in terms of peer reviews.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Response to “Five Common Pitfalls of Online Course Design:\u00a0#5: Ignore the ways students learn from each other“ The course I’m redesigning covers\u00a0 3D modeling, including 2D and 3D design, color, lighting, and spatial narrative. This is a 4 credit course … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7522,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[103045,103047],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-course-design","category-integrating-online-on-campus-learning"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3LFgN-fd","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/hybridflc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/hybridflc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/hybridflc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/hybridflc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7522"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/hybridflc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=943"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/hybridflc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":950,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/hybridflc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943\/revisions\/950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/hybridflc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/hybridflc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/hybridflc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}