This project will establish and evaluate an innovative educational approach where a large and diverse group of students develop their general creativity using a web-based, online learning environment. Unique to the proposed learning environment is that it provides automated grading, using proven techniques of computer-based peer review, while engaging students in a discipline-based fine arts curriculum. The environment will be designed to handle very large classes and to move students through the course content autonomously (without an instructor), automatically and asynchronously within a schedule of content delivery and creative assignments.
This new approach to education will establish a method of teaching and learning that could completely change, in some instances, the landscape of accessibility and availability of education. All that is required is a community of learners agreeing on participation in a pre-designed and broadly scheduled learning process (thus becoming a cohort). A cohort can be a group of high school seniors, a group of new Army recruits, an online community of home-schooled students, a group of senior citizens (or any life-long learners), or any combination of these. One could envision a variety of open source courses developing around the explosive amount of content now freely available. Autonomous cohort learning is one solution to the burgeoning growth in learners across the globe, and a way to guide large groups of learners to realize their individual creative potentials.
The goal of this project was to establish and evaluate an innovative educational approach where a diverse group of students develop their general creativity using a web-based, online learning environment as a creativity enhancing tool. This was accomplished and the system has proven robust enough that starting Fall 2013 one course with large enrollments is now taught fully online, implementing the processes outlined in the grant proposal. The online course will also be taught in Spring 2014. In the project a learning environment was established that provided automated quantitative and qualitative assessments and meta-assessments (grading is graded), while engaging students (primarily non-art majors) in a discipline-based fine arts curriculum. The environment was designed to handle large classes (so far with enrollments as high as 260 students) and moved students through course content autonomously, automatically and asynchronously within a schedule of content delivery and creative assignments. Much of what was developed here has now also been implemented elsewhere, in massive scale, in what are called MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), through websites such as 'cousera.org', 'udacity.com', 'edX.org' and others. There are a couple significant differences and some similarities between this pilot project and these much larger systems (that are mostly funded by venture capital and partnering universities). 1.) In this project the system was designed to work with large university classes (100-200 students or more), not the massive numbers of a MOOC (50K-100K students). Perhaps, somewhat whimsically the system implemented for this grant could be thought of as a "mini-MOOC", not requiring the MOOCs large investment in resources, in staffing or IT. 2.)This project's system is built on Moodle (moodle.org), an open source Learning Management System (LMS) freely available to anyone. Moodle easily handles the enrollment numbers of a large university class. Any individual or group could run their own LMS, working with a couple hundred students, at a cost of as little as five dollars a month. Anyone with something to teach and a learning community that is interested can run a mini-MOOC. 3.) Like the MOOCs, there is still a need for development of content and well-considered pedagogy, implemented to fully embrace and leverage the opportunities of online delivery and assessment. 4.) The single biggest barrier to learning in this type of environment is within the students themselves. A significant percentage are simply not engaged in the learning process and often try to game the system using a variety of strategies (around 10-15% on average for the courses taught with support from this grant). These students want to earn credit for a course (often required as part of their degree program), but they do not appear interested in actually learning the materials of the course. The process of meta-assessments has proven invaluable in recognizing these students and removing their influence from the process, ensuring the other members of the class, those who are honestly engaged in the learning process, are successful. (It is possible for one person, versed in the content of the course, to shepherd a group of two hundred or so students through this process with one workday a week of effort. Results from this grant might suggest that there will be a new job description appearing in education for individuals can who serve as guides and mentors to a subset of students enrolled in a large or massive online course.) 5.) Learning management systems can provide successful learning environments, and through the assessment techniques employed in this grant, it is possible to measure outcomes and determine whether learning has occurred. Preliminary data indicates that this is indeed the case, and as these systems continue to be refined over the next few years, they will find a permanent place in the portfolio of practices available for teaching and learning. Some final observations: Pedagogy developed for art courses can steer students towards behaviors that could be called "creative". This is directly measureable, and somewhat obvious, in the studio art classes where computer based peer-assessment was employed. The online anonymous space created for student critique proved beneficial, especially for students who tended not to participate in group critique in class. It removed one aspect of the fear of failure, allowing risk to be more a part of their creative activity. It was specifically in a large art appreciation course that a creative habit-of-mind was most directly practiced and developed by non-art students, through weekly description and interpretation of a diverse selection of artworks. In student surveys 80% indicate they believe that they were more creative in the responses to artworks by the end of the semester. How one measures creativity is still an issue. Currently a body of student work by specific individuals, over the course of the semester, is being reviewed to see if improvement over time is somehow recognizable and measureable, and somehow usuable in developing creativity.
