Project Summary:
Online education strives to include students regardless of their geographic locations, as long as they have internet connections and compatible hardware. It can make education more accessible and inclusive for students with diverse learning needs and reduce the requirement to travel to a physical location for classes, making it more cost-effective. Both OCAD U and Ontario Tech currently offer online learning via video-conferencing and asynchronous learning management systems (LMS), that is, through online systems that allow students to learn on their own schedules wherever they are, instead of at a set class time one place.
However, in design education, online students miss out on crucial hands-on experiences that on-campus students benefit from. In a typical course that includes design prototyping, for example, students engage in 3D printing, laser cutting, and shop fabrication; peers are frequently involved in testing and evaluating each design iteration, which requires interaction with physical prototypes. While online students may be able to present some aspects of their physical prototypes through video-conferencing and 3D CAD models, many remotely located peers are not able to touch, feel and manipulate the prototypes as designed. In other words, online design students are excluded from many hands-on aspects of design education.
This new online project-based design course will use consumer-level virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) to include remotely located students in hands-on design prototyping. The course will be interconnected with a network of maker-spaces, allowing remote learners to access physical prototyping resources within their local communities. This will allow for a rhizomatic educational experience in which learning is more participatory and fluid, with students interacting in a more meaningful way to inform each other’s understanding of the subject matter.
Project Lead: Peter Coppin MFA, PhD, Associate Professor of Design and Graduate Program Director for Inclusive Design (OCAD U)
Project Team: Teresa Lee, MDes (OCAD U), others from Ontario Tech TBD