Parallel Session
The Lived Experience of Undergraduate Students in Creative (Design) Studies In Emergency Distance Education During The Covid-19 Pandemic
Dr C Stoltz-Urban
Quality Assurance Manager
Inscape Education Group
Dr Carin Stoltz-Urban is a mature senior manager with a special interest in quality assurance. She currently works as the Quality Assurance Manager – Teaching and Learning, at the Inscape Education Group, where her work involves quality assurance and quality enhancement. Carin’s Masters addressed the role of Professional Bodies in the South African education and training system, and her PhD dealt with postgraduate student success.
Mr PHarrison
Postgrauate Academic Manager
Inscape Education Group
Peter Harrison is the Postgraduate Academic Manager at Inscape Education Group. He has a Master of Technology Degree in Industrial Design, from the University of Johannesburg and is passionate about design, design research, and equipping young postgrad design researchers.
Ms Gail Barry
Inscape Education Group
Gail Barry holds a Masters Degree in Education with a specialisation in ICT from the University of Johannesburg and a Masters Degree in Interior Architecture from the University of Pretoria. She works at Inscape Education group and is currently developing and expanding Inscape's online and course offerings.
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a radical and multi-faceted impact on higher education worldwide. The pandemic and the resultant strict South African lockdown regulations forced higher education institutions to resort to emergency remote teaching (Hodges et al., 2020), even where students would normally attend classes fulltime. The South African context is also impacted by the continued socio-economic inequality, which results in unequal access to technology, data, and connectivity (Du Preez & Le Grange, 2020).
The authors’ institution is no different from other higher education institutions in South Africa and worldwide in that it had to adjust its mode of delivery to emergency distance education, but what makes this case interesting, is the fact that the institution primarily offers design programmes, where distance learning is not traditionally seen as a viable option.
Most design disciplines use studio teaching as their primary pedagogy (Fleischman, 2019). This places a high premium on face-to-face interactions which guide learning through dialogue and feedback on individual work. As a result, online teaching is widely believed to be unsuited to teaching and learning design (Fleischman, 2019).
In addition to the pedagogical concern explained above, the institution’s lecturers are well-versed in contact learning, but most had limited exposure to online learning and teaching up to the time of the pandemic. The transition to emergency distance education naturally posed challenges related to the skillsets of the academic staff at the institution.
The study employed a phenomenological approach, using qualitative data collected from students regarding their lived experience of emergency distance learning during the 2020 and 2021 academic years. The intention was to learn from the experience of the students and to improve the online teaching practice of the institution. In addition, the study aimed to establish whether any, and if yes, which, subjects or modules were better suited for online learning, and to consider a new pedagogical approach at the institution, taking the preferences and needs of students and subjects into account.
The paper explores the issue both in the literature and from the empirical evidence gathered and draws conclusions on the pedagogical approach of the institution.
Keywords: Undergraduate, Design, Studio Teaching, Online, Pedagogy
CARIN STOLTZ-URBAN.pdf