The coronavirus pandemic negatively impacted all areas of life, including the art and design education. While schools and universities quickly adapted to online learning, teaching of hands on, practical skills, indispensable for creative disciplines, has suffered greatly. The ACCELERATE strategic partnership of several universities aims to remedy this situation by developing innovative methodologies, tools, platforms, and resources for accessible immersive learning in art and design.
We are proud to announce that lecturers form our School of Form, Anita Basińska, Ph.D., sociologist specializing in applied sociological research, Monika Rosińska, Ph.D., sociologist and design researcher, and Filip Zagórski, graphic designer specializing in visual communication, will contribute their expertise to this international project that brings together art and design lecturers, educational researchers, and learning technologists from the UK, Ireland, Poland, and Ukraine.
ACCELERATE: Accessible Immersive Learning for Art and Design
ACCELERATE is a new two-year project, funded by Erasmus+, that will develop innovative methodologies, tools, platforms, and resources for accessible immersive learning in art and design.
The initiative will draw on the spirit of practice-led creative innovation that art and design lecturers have been invoking since March 2020. It will focus on the potential transformative role of immersive technologies (augmented, virtual, and mixed realities, also known as extended reality (XR)) in the teaching of art and design while recognizing that many learners face significant challenges in engaging effectively with XR technologies, due to factors such as disabilities; complex personal circumstances; low quality devices; poor and unreliable internet access.
School of Form’s Contribution to ACCELERATE
School of Form will lead the Initial Needs Analysis phase of the project (June 2021 – February 2022) and will organize a three-day “Train a Trainer” session in 2022.
While the last few months have prompted the publication of numerous articles and surveys assessing the impact of COVID-19 on teaching and learning across Europe, there has not yet been a systematic attempt to assess the impact specifically on art and design teaching or the experiences of art and design students, who have been deprived of the opportunity to learn practical skills, which are the core of artistic and creative disciplines, in specialized workshops and studios.
Researchers from School of Form will develop questionnaires aimed at students, lecturers, and technical staff, conduct structured discussions with students through focus-groups, and prepare a diagnostic report. The report will provide a detailed qualitative and quantitative assessment of the impact of COVID-19 on the undergraduate teaching of art, design, and related practice-based subjects over the pandemic 2020-2021.
The report is anticipated to be one of the first surveys of the experience of art and design teaching during the pandemic. The report's findings will directly shape the development of ACCELERATE's methodological guide and immersive ecosystem by identifying core principles and recommendations for accessible immersive learning in art and design. These findings will also be shared with the broader art and design community through the project website, with the potential to inform pedagogical practice at other universities in Europe and beyond.
Additionally, academics from School of Form, who have particular interests and experiences in developing innovative digital learning experiences, will organize a three-day “Training for Trainers” session on accessible immersive learning methods. The goal will be to draft practical training guidelines and materials that could help art and design teachers develop accessible immersive learning methods.
The School of Form team:
- Anita Basińska, Ph.D.
- Monika Rosińska, Ph.D.
- Filip Zagórski.
By engaging with the layered complexities of XR accessibility and immersive learning, ACCELERATE has the capacity to be genuinely pioneering in its pedagogical and technological outcomes and to find new ways of engaging with art and design students from disadvantaged and underrepresented groups.
New Platform for Accessible Immersive Teaching in Art and Design
ACCELERATE will create a new prototype platform for accessible immersive teaching in art and design that aims to democratize XR technology rather than limit it to those with the best equipment and the fastest connections. The collaborative development of this immersive ecosystem — open-source, scalable, sustainable — as a gateway for art and design lecturers and students with little or no previous experience of XR technologies will be informed by a considered evaluation of the impact of COVID-19 on art and design teaching at the partner universities, the co-drafting of a methodological guide, and the co-designing of a standalone online training course addressed to lecturers. The platform will provide teaching materials, including co-created case studies, that will draw on the shared expertise and perspectives of the project partners. In addition, the project will be supported by a cohort of forty Accessible Learning Student Ambassadors based at five of the partnering universities.
Strategic Partnership
The strategic Partnership brings together art and design lecturers, educational researchers, and learning technologists from the UK, Ireland, Poland, and Ukraine to reflect on the impact of COVID-19 on higher education teaching and to explore new possibilities for pedagogy and digital innovation.
The following universities will contribute their expertise to the project:
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