COURSE SUMMARY
- VISA 110 “Visual Arts Digital Foundation” studio is an introductory Visual Art studio course that focuses on how the machine influences, and has influenced, art making.
- The class consists of 420-480 students per year, divided into 3 sections, the smallest section is 100 students, the largest is 240 students.
- Course structure is 1 hour of lecture time with me, and 3 hours of lab time with a Teaching Assistant.
- The lecture introduces the students to larger concepts of the class, with historical and theoretical “backing” of professional artist examples.
- There is a range of 5-13 labs per section, resulting in about 3-10 different TAs to manage per section.
- Before the “flip” labs consist(ed) of mainly software demonstrations, accounting for about 60% of contact hour time, followed by critiques, and reading discussions.
- Through practice and research, students develop digital literacy, medium awareness and learn how visual representations communicate.
- The course is a combination of historical and theoretical propositions of art and representation through recording devices, such as the lens and other digital formats.
- It is primarily a studio course, therefore students are required to execute an artwork to demonstrate their research and critical thought process when working with sources.
- The execution format of the course projects is focused on digital works, therefore students must use software (usually Adobe Photoshop, Premiere and Audacity) to execute the work.
CHALLENGES OF CLASS
- Diverse Student Backgrounds
Students have a varied experiences with the programs, therefore there was no way for a TA to deliver technical demonstrations in lab that would work for all students. Some students were new and needed time and repetition and a slower pace, some were bored because they had previous experience with the software, though not the concepts of the class. - Student Schedules
Being a 4 hour/week class at sometimes awkward times, (to be able to use a ‘high demand’ lab) became difficult for this generation’s schedule reality, (jobs, increased tuition, etc) thus, flexibility in certain aspects of learning could help out with the scheduling pressures. A flipped classroom would enable me to use contact hours in a more fruitful way, reduced contact hours for unscheduled online learning. - TA Inconsistency
Not all TA’s had the technical knowledge needed to conduct the demonstrations, some TA’s do not even work in the digital medium. Therefore, a succinct standard of demonstrations was not practiced throughout the different lab sections. - TA as a Resource
Under-utilized the specialties of the TA’s on technical demonstrations, when they are valuable because of their role as artists and researchers. Overall TA’s felt unfulfilled in this teaching opportunity compared to non-digital art classes. - Distraction
Students tended to be pre-occupied with technical skill-building rather than main objectives of the course -which are worth more to them, their grade, and meeting the department’s critical outcomes. Simply not enough contact hours to address both sufficiently. Technical skill-building was a distraction to the academic objective of “how to read and create contemporary artworks that demonstrate an affective, ethical, critical and intelligent approach to the digital medium.” - Student Pride & Decision Making
Limited contact hours and time-consuming nature of technical demonstrations only allowed for TA’s to teach one program per project in one specific way. Therefore, many projects looked like variations of the same. This doesn’t really work for art making. Therefore, by making software self-learning we were able to introduce a choice of which software to learn, resulting in either a still image, moving image, sound work or animated gif. The process of decision making for form is an important learning moment, that would eventually inform the reading and agency of the artwork.