Can an online forum address a lack of student engagement?

In my teaching development project I wanted to tackle the issue of a lack of student engagement on the BA Fashion Illustration course.

Poor attendance is the biggest and most obvious sign of this lack of engagement, and when students and staff come in to classes with very low numbers it’s a real let down. The capacity for energetic and dynamic activity is reduced and the atmosphere suffers.

Where is everyone?? It doesn’t feel like a thriving community of practitioners engaged in their medium.

How do you engage students when they won’t come to class? My idea was to use an online arena… reaching stay-at-home students as well as part-time staff members, and engaging both students and staff in a community of practice online.

I called the blog ‘How are you doing’. Group members were encouraged to post a weekly self-portrait and to engage in constructive dialogue, leaving each other feedback and responses to each other’s drawings.

I ran the blog with the 3^rd Year students during terms 2 & 3 while they were completing their Final Major Project.

About half of the students participated, mostly the regular attenders BUT also some of the non-attenders. They engaged in some useful and constructive dialogue, although most of it was quite surface level.

Overall the momentum didn’t really build within the time frame. The project took a lot of hand tending, and I had to tease out almost every single posting and comment, it was very labor intensive.

The project did yield some breakthroughs… Students engaged with a shared practice, and there was the beginning of a line of communication between absent students and diligent attenders.

But more time was needed to really foster sustained interaction.

The students didn’t readily engage in a constructive dialogue, they need more support to build these skills, probably in the studio environment on campus.

Busy students (and staff) found it difficult to make time to engage in a shared practice outside of the assessment system. There was also the issue that the 3^rd Year students were already firmly ingrained in a culture of disengagement.

All of the students said they would have participated more if they had been introduced to the practice from year 1, so…. That’s my next project, to create a course blog for Fashion Illustration, harnessing the wider community of practitioners, as a tool for professional practice and most importantly as a means for engaging students.

DISCLAIMER: Please excuse the shoddy drawings, dodgy stop-motion animation and all-round terrible quality, I made this in a day.