Online Studio Courses

When YVC moved online in March, I moved my three clay finals online, but was still able to get on campus that week to load and unload kilns and try to get the studio in decent shape for not being used until fall. Of course I didn't realize, in March, that students wouldn't be using the YVC clay studio for a full year (at least). Since then, getting to campus has gotten harder. We have to get permission for each trip and at various times faculty have had to fill out forms, check-in, get our temperature taken, and check out online.

Shiverball wants to know "why are you still home?"

In the spring quarter, my teaching load consisted of classes that I'd already taught online. I happened to have just two classes that quarter (because my studio classes have more class meeting hours, I meet my annual load earlier in the year), and neither one was a studio or clay class, so I didn't have to solve the issue of moving a studio online. I was also leading contract negotiations for the union in the spring and early summer, so I was able to fill up any extra time time pretty quickly.

YVC Clay studio in early October, with Winter 2020 student work ready to be packed for curbside pickup.

This quarter I am teaching a totally different schedule, including converting two studios to online, which has had me running full speed for months. In September, as we were looking at course enrollments, my department realized that we could add an extra drawing class, but that meant shuffling instructors. I haven't taught a drawing class to adults in more than 15 years, and I've never taught drawing at the college level, so instead of having me take the drawing class, we ended up swapping classes around and I took a Design course from our adjunct who added a section of drawing. With a couple of weeks to go before the quarter, I was suddenly planning to teach 2D Design, Art History, and Art Appreciation all entirely online.

Ripped paper collage demo from back in the day, one of the few things I was able to use for my 2D Design online.

I've taught all three classes, but its been years since I taught Art Appreciation or 2D Design. I had never taught 2D Design online, and the last time I taught Art Appreciation online my now middle-school daughter was a newborn (literally less than a month old when I started) and the learning management system was entirely different. 

Some sketches I did to prep and plan one of our Design projects this quarter.

As I was prepping Art Appreciation and Design, I started to feel a sense of dread for the start of the quarter. I had stopped teaching Art Appreciation because I was getting bored teaching the same thing over and over, but when I did teach it, it was a very hands-on class. We had guest artist demos and we visited Larson Gallery and all the public art on campus. Students were constantly drawing on the board or working in groups or standing up to present to the class. Moving such an active class online seemed daunting and a bit depressing. I was also trying to use an OER textbook/textbook alternative. 

I guess I might be biased because I like books. After spending all day on the computer, I'd rather not read on the computer, too.

Open Educational Resources are a good idea, at least in theory. They are meant to be free alternatives to expensive textbooks, but the quality for Art Appreciation, in my opinion, is a little uneven. I started working with a couple of OER resources shared on the Canvas Commons, but a lot of editing was needed. In fact, I ended up using bits of one of these OER for the Design class, though I'm not sure how much it's worth, as I did a lot of editing and I supplemented quite a bit with stuff I developed. There were typos and misspellings, but worse were the missing images. At one point, I read a section over and over trying to understand what they were describing before realizing that an image must have been eliminated or changed without any changes made to the text. The text was describing an image that wasn't named or visible, but was similar to what was included, which threw me off for a while.

Some work of my own I might finish some day, maybe in December

I was also worried about teaching Design. I was originally hired at YVC to teach Design, Art Appreciation, and Functional Pottery. I was pretty comfortable, at age 26, teaching pottery and Art Appreciation, but the design class was a bit of an unknown territory for me. At the end of my graduate program, I applied for 60-some college teaching jobs all over the country. Most of the positions were clay positions, but there was a healthy mix of design, general art, sculpture, and drawing responsibilities, too. Design wasn't that much of a stretch, given that design principles are discussed in all entry-level art classes, and I'd taught plenty of community art classes of all sorts to kids and adults, but when I took the YVC job, the Design class was the most intimidating. I'd never taken the class myself. My undergraduate program didn't required Design (called 2D Fundamentals) for art majors and my graduate TA was in clay, so I never even sat in on more than half an hour of a Design class. (The floor plan for my undergraduate art building was open, so it was possible to be "in" the 2D Fundamentals class when walking through the building or finding materials or tools for another class.)

Some of my design projects ended up featuring things from my house. I recorded a demo video for design in my clay studio, then ended up using Bludoph as my example drawing.

A little over a week before the quarter started, with my stress and anxiety about Design and Art Appreciation mounting, I was in a meeting that incidentally included mention of someone's daughter taking a clay class at a university. After a great first week, the university classes were forced to "pivot" to online because of COVID. The daughter was disappointed in her clay class now because it was all writing and research. 

Basic plan: get them clay, have them make stuff

I called my mom to complain, nearly crying with frustration because I knew I could teach an online clay clay class that was more engaging than this one sounded. I'd even presented a plan for what we'd do for studio kits and alternatives to firing and glazing. I'd presented this earlier in the summer and was told that I couldn't teach it. Since it had been a few months since initially made the proposal, I contacted my boss and laid out my plan. She immediately gave me permission to teach Hand-building online and I had about a week to get studio kits ready, get students signed up, and design a class!

Studio kits ready to be distributed (PVC pipe rolling pin, canvas, brushes, tools, and glaze jars)

For some reason, getting permission to teach the clay class energized me for teaching the Design class, too. I was writing class plans in the hair salon while my daughter got her haircut and waking up in the middle of the night to write down ideas. The hand-building class I had taught many times before, but never online. For the past few years I've been making a ton of videos to use in my "flipped" clay classes. These are great resources and I have thanked past-Rachel many times for doing the work which would have been absolutely overwhelming to try to do all at once this fall (especially from my home studio). I'm also grateful that I had help making these videos back in the day. 

Students have to submit their work online, too, which means first they need to learn to take quality photographs

But putting video demos online and putting a whole class online is a whole different thing. Besides the fact that ALL directions have to be online (and some students aren't going to read them anyway or watch the video explanation), but so do all reminders, all submissions, all tips and tricks, and hints, and help! There is so much that happens in a face-to-face studio class that its difficult to even quantify. At least, it was difficult to identify before we all lost it to the pandemic, now I'm sure I am not alone in realizing what's missing when teaching the "same" class online.

I did not have a pre-existing video demo of how to wrap up your greenware so that it could be driven to campus for firing.

I had to make adjustments to videos and video playlists that relied heavily on studio tools the students wouldn't have at home. My Hand-building class usually uses the slab-roller, extruder, and armatures, not to mention kilns and glaze equipment, none of which the students would have access to at home. They don't have access to nearly as many small tools, either. Of the four projects I usually use, I could only keep one, coil-building, nearly intact. The slab & texture project and videos had to be significantly revised, given that students cannot access a slab roller or our studio forms, texture rollers, and textured fabric collection, not to mention slips, slip trailers, and underglaze. I had to completely scrap the extruder, 3D printer, solid building, and mold projects that I've used over the years.

A screenshot of part of the kiln loading interactive lesson.

Additionally, I can't force students to bring work back to campus, so I can't require them to fire or glaze their work, though I am offering that as an option. Of course students who do drop off their work for firing can't come in to load kilns with me. Instead, I've created an interactive kiln-loading lesson for them to do at home. My vision of it was super awesome: I imagined students being able to click on pictures of work and drag them onto shelves. Alas, the technology (that I'm aware of) doesn't seem to be there yet, so the interactive lesson has more video demos and click on the right part of the kiln, than interactive multi-layer "loading." 

One of the images in the interactive kiln loading lesson: which kiln post should be used?

The most challenging thing to build-in to the online class is all the stuff that never made it into any formal plan or paperwork. Of course I give students assignment parameters, but I spend an enormous amount of time during class making adjustments, talking to students, pointing out issues before they become problems, etc. In an online class, I cannot be looking over their shoulders and I can't spot problems. And then can see me make a slight adjustment to a neighbor, ether. I do require the online students to check in with me and show progress, but around the end of week 2 I discovered that the clay folks in particular had an extra hurdle. In order for me to be able to given them feedback, I need to see the work, and not only that, I need to see images of the work that communicate useful information about the form of the work. It turned out that students desperately needed more help taking photographs that show the actual form and texture of their work. It's tough to judge thickness from a photo. It's even tougher to judge distance from a slightly out of focus photograph taken from directly above with the camera shadow falling over half the piece. 

Pictures like this make it really difficult to assess the quality of the work

Ironically, the Design class (which I was more worried about) has gone more smoothly, in some respects. I suspect that is because I had nothing built. I reused a couple of bits and pieces from the last time I taught it (before ~2013), but most of this quarter's class I made from scratch. Making it from scratch meant I didn't really have any expectations and from the start I built-in more manual checks (where students had to submit plans, sketches, or photos of progress before they could proceed). Overall I think the Design class benefited from the fact that I was more worried about it and that I wasn't imagining what it would be like in the studio.

I gave the designers lots of images, to begin with, about how to submit and how to do projects, and eventually lots of video demos, too.

As I am revising this, I've just finished planning week 7 (of 10ish) and I've just about finished grading week 6. Three weeks of prep looks more or less manageable from this vantage point, and I even have plans in my head for each of those weeks. I have a really exciting plan, I think, for the last clay project, but I've never done it before, so...fingers crossed.