Background Information

Alberta Council for the Ukrainian Arts (ACUA) is a non-profit, provincial arts organization located in Edmonton.  It is the mandate of our organization to promote and support the development of Ukrainian art and artists through exhibitions, tours, festivals, educational programs, professional development, workshops, and special project. ACUA currently supports artists from 6 of the 7 traditional genres of art including sculpture, painting, literature, music, performing, and film.  Currently, ACUA has over 150 artists who are actively engaged with our organization.  As well as, have a number of artists in our membership who have previously engaged with us or support our work, but don’t actively work with us on a regular basis.

In my current role, I work with ACUA artists on a day-to-day basis and hear from them the struggles they face as artists to move from the role of emerging to professional artist.  While in Canada, there is an uptake in arts and humanities graduates securing employment in the tech sector (Lewington, 2019), less than half of fine art graduates work as professional artists after they graduate (Jahoda et al., 2014 and Statistics Canada, 2017).  As a result, ACUA started to research the possibility of offering a professional development series to assist artists in learning skills that professional artists need to have in order to run a business, as opposed to working as an employee.  There are a number of non-member art organizations and post-secondary institutes in Alberta who strive to promote the arts and artists and offer professional development in business and education in arts and humanities, but to date, ACUA has not found a program that is all-encompassing and focuses on arts business professional development, as outlined in Appendix A.  As a result of our research, ACUA has identified the need to develop and implement a professional development series targeted at recent graduates of fine arts programs or emerging artists.

The development of the series will be led by Larisa Sembaliuk-Cheladyn who is a successful and professional artist.  Larisa has worked for over 30 years as an artist, has exhibited her art throughout the world, and has commissions in collections throughout the world including in Prince Philip’s personal art collection.  She holds a BFA in Art & Design, a MA in Ukrainian Folklore, and is currently completing a PhD in Media and Cultural Studies.  Larisa has worked with universities to develop coursework in art and cultural studies programs.  She also has a wealth of knowledge in the arts community and will be able to recruit individuals who will be able to successfully develop and instruct this professional development series.

At this point in the project a series outline has been developed by myself and Larisa.  It has been determined that the individual courses in the series will be delivered as synchronous workshops, which allows for short-periods of delivery, flexibility for length and frequency of sessions, and the workshops will build on one another, but can also be taken individually.  We do recognize that based on the variety of workshops that will be developed, the broad range of skills participants have, and the amount of information that will need to be covered in some of the workshops, some workshops may require pre and/or post work, which will have to be completed by participants asynchronously.  We anticipate the first 8 workshops in this series will include the following topics: bookkeeping for artists, framing and presentation, writing grant proposals, preparing artwork for reproduction, preparing for exhibits and festivals, developing a website, social media marketing, working with art galleries and agents, and contracts and considerations for commissioned works.

Project Description

The next step in this project is to develop a tool that can be used as a learning management system, registration and enrolment system, and communication tool to engage ACUAs active and inactive artists in this project.  The infrastructure of this tool will be developed using the content management system WordPress.  By using WordPress, ACUA will be able to maintain the tool with the current IT resources they have once my role with the project is complete.

Initially, myself and ACUA will use the tool to create two-way communication between the organization and artists.  The tool will be used to reach out to artists and tell them about the professional development series that is being developed.  Artists will be able to sign up to receive more information about the project.  This will allow ACUA to generate a database of potential series participants.  Also, as part of the development of this tool, a survey will be created that artists can complete when they visit the website that will tell the artist what professional development workshops we would like to develop and allow ACUA to survey artists about what type of professional development workshops they feel they would benefit them.  Although a draft outline of the workshop series sessions exists, this information will be used by ACUA and Larisa to develop the first eight courses in the workshop series.  Going forward, ACUA will be able to use the tool to reach out to artists and have them respond back, providing powerful data to ACUA to integrate into their decision making for the professional development series and allowing artist to provide feedback to ACUA.  For example, once we start development of the series, we would like to use the communication tool to find experts who may be interested in developing and teaching series sessions.

The infrastructure of the WordPress site, will also provide a tool to manage participant registrations and workshop content once the development of the professional development series is completed.  In order to do this, the tool will integrate a WordPress LMS plugin.  Being a provincial organization, ACUA has artists spread across the Province of Alberta, in BC, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario.  It is likely that the workshops will be offered online in order to accommodate artist availability.  Implementing a WordPress LMS plugin will allow ACUA to organize workshop content in one central location, will provide learners with unlimited access to the learning materials, will provide instructors a way to track progress and performance, when required, and will allow instructors to easily integrate social learning experiences.  It will also be an affordable way for ACUA to develop course content, with most WordPress LMS plugins costing between $150-300 per year.  Going forward, ACUA will be able to easily develop content consistent to what has been previously developed.  For the purposes of this project, a simple registration form and course shell will be created.  As the project develops, these templates could change.

Project Outcomes and Key Frameworks

The outcomes of the project are:

• To undertake the development of a WordPress site that can be used to communicate with artists, organize workshop content, and assist with the management of participant registrations
• To create a tool that will provide ACUA two-way communication with artists
• To create the infrastructure for ACUA to develop eLearning content in a central location
• To be able to track registrations electronically, once the content has been developed and gone live

The key frameworks that support the design of my project proposal are related to social-constructivism and connectivism approaches to learning.  From a social-constructivist perspective, learning is the active construction of meaning through interactions with both the social and physical world (Bush, 2006). The social emphasis that is relevant to my proposal would occur through the use of collaborative learning activities that will be developed, while the physical world would exist within the infrastructure the WordPress site.  Looking at learning from the perspective of Siemens’ connectivism theory also enhances my proposal (Siemen, 2005).  This theory suggests that that people no longer stop learning after formal education and continue to gain knowledge from other avenues such as job skills, networking, experience and access to information with new tools in technology.  As McWilliam and Taylor (1996) indicated, the issue of life-long learning has become associated with the advocacy of open learning, and open learning has become associated with the development of an electronic means for the storage, retrieval, interactive development, and transmission of information.

The key frameworks that support the design of my project proposal are also related to communication theory in media ecology.  As McLuhan (1964) proposes a communication medium itself, not the message it carries, should be the primary focus of study.  He argues that the medium or the outlet, somehow changes our understanding of the content and the message is secondary.  In order for the messages to be communicated to artists, the most important part of the message is the medium or the structure in which the message is created on the WordPress site.  It is then up to the artist to decode the message, and it will be important for me to ensure that the message being sent is clear.  McLuhan (1964) indicated that there is interdependence between different media and between us as we consume this media and one of the characteristics of the global village is instant communication.  If the WordPress site is developed at this point with the WordPress LMS plugin, it will communicate to artists that the professional development series will include eLearning technologies and the survey that will be created to collect data from artists about the type of professional development they require should allow me to collect more relevant data.

Design and Verification

Design is an important part of the process and I recognize that it’s also important to assess the effectiveness of my design throughout.  As Bates (2019) indicates in the SECTIONS model, it is important that users not get bogged down on learning how to use educational technologies or making technologies work, the cost of technology integrated can not become too expensive, and feedback is an important part of interaction.  Given this framework, the design of the WordPress site must be easy to use for both the artist and ACUA administrators.  I will choose a pre-formatted template to design the WordPress site.  The design must also be cost effective for ACUA to maintain.  They currently have IT support to maintain a WordPress website and have approved expenses for an WordPress LMS plugin.  Finally, creating a space for artists to sign up to receive more information about the proposed professional development courses will start to engage current member artists, but may also attract artists that ACUA has not worked with in the past.  As well as, creating a survey to collect data about perceived shortfalls in artists skills, will provide ACUA with the data needed to move forward with the development of topics to cover in the professional development series.  The hope is that artists who are providing this feedback will shape the development of the series, and increase the interaction with the WordPress site.

It is important my design is innovative and authentic.  Throughout the design process, I will employ a number of verification activities to ensure the design objectives are being met.  I will be designing the tool on my own, but will evaluate it from an instructional design and learner perspective.  I will also receive peer feedback by presenting my design to my classmates, who are educators with vast knowledge, skills, and experience.  Finally, I will also receive instructor feedback by presenting my design to Suzanne de Castell, my instructor for ETEC 565B Metatheory: New Materialism meets the History of Educational Media.  This feedback will help me to identify errors and allows for improvement of the overall design of the tool.

 

References

Bates, T. (2019). Chapter 8: Choosing and using media in education: the SECTIONS model [E-book]. In Teaching in a Digital Age: Guidelines for designing teaching and learning (2nd ed., pp. 306–361).  Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/

Bush, G. (2006). Learning about learning: From theories to trends. Teacher Librarian, 34(2), 14-18.

Jahoda, S., Murphy, B., Virgin, V., & Woolard, C. (2014). Artists Report Back. BFAMFAPhD. http://bfamfaphd.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/BFAMFAPhD_ArtistsReportBack2014-10.pdf

Lewington, J. (2019, April 29). An arts degree could get graduates a job in the tech sector. Macleans.Ca. https://www.macleans.ca/education/yes-you-will-get-a-job-with-that-arts-degree/

McLuhan, M. (1964). The Medium is the Message. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (pp. 9–23). Signet Books. Retrieved from https://designopendata.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/understanding-media-mcluhan.pdf

McWilliam, E., & Taylor, P. (1996). Pedagogical challenges of open learning: Looking to borderline issues. In Pedagogy, Technology and the Body (pp. 59–77). Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers.

Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2(1) http://www.itdl.org/

Statistics Canada (2017). Are young bachelor’s degree holders finding jobs that match their studies? [Data table]. Statistics Canada. https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/as-sa/98-200-x/2016025/98-200-x2016025-eng.cfm?wbdisable=true