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Sad but true: Design is dominated by white, able-bodied men. Reports on the design economy demographics make for rather depressing reading in this regard. The analysis reveals that the industry is mostly white, male and from “more advantaged groups”. A whole list of challenges – from inaccessible mentoring schemes for graduates to 20% gender pay gap – results in the fact that even in such economies as the UK, where design is thriving, the profession is 78% male and 87% white. The research finds that women are less likely than men to be in senior roles; while 88% of design managers are white, compared to 7% from an Asian background, 2% from Black, Asian and ethnic minorities, and 3% from other ethnic groups.

The design industry is lacking diversity and it is obvious that one of the biggest reasons to that is education with its high tuitions, unbalanced curriculum focusing mainly on Western design tradition and “mostly white, mostly male” staff. Notwithstanding the fact that creative arts and design are often thought as disciplines of expression and liberal thinking, it appears that it is the pedagogies themselves that are contributing to a crisis of diversity, leaving women and Black, Asian and ethnic minority students feeling excluded of the practice.

There are many areas of art and design pedagogical practice in which inclusivity, equality and diversity can be enhanced. Education systems rarely connect with students outside of the Eurocentric narrative. In the academic year 2018/2019, 108,965 white students were enrolled in creative arts and design-related undergraduate degrees, compared with just 5,855 and 5,155 from Black and Asian backgrounds respectively.

However, the diversity problem in design education is not only in the numbers, but also in the lack of diverse role models. Students and educators point out that most design courses taught in the higher education institutions focus on “Anglocentric and Eurocentric ways of seeing”, just as most publications focus on Western design tradition. Movements such as Swiss Modernism, Bauhaus, Dada, De Stijl, and Art Deco are all heavily emphasized in design education, leaving non-Western tradition (such as design from Latin America, South America, Africa, and all of Asia) under-represented.

Danah Abdulla, designer, researcher, current programme director of graphic design at the Camberwell and Chelsea colleges, University of the Arts (UAL), explains, “Students are aware of the histories they’re being shown, and not shown. How often does a student of Indian origin gets to hear about a good Indian designer? What effect do you think that eventually has on how they perceive the profession?”

“Diversity in design means diversity of experience, perspective and creativity”

That is the position supported by Harriet Harriss, dean of the Pratt School of Architecture and former architecture and interior design research lead at the Royal College of Art. “You can’t be what you can’t see,” she says. ”And if marginalised students don’t see themselves represented on their reading lists and in their curriculum, this in turn leads to a feeling of being marginalised in the discipline”.

Here, we come across another term often being used interchangeably with “diversity” – “decolonization.” Though the terms are linked, diversity is about bringing more people to the table, while decolonization is about changing the way we think. For many decades, design values and history have been taught through a canon, the accepted pantheon of work by predominantly European and American male designers, that sets the basis for what is “good” or “bad.” The sad truth is that authority of the canon has undermined the work produced by non-Western cultures and those from poorer backgrounds so that Ghanaian textiles, for example, get classified as craft rather than design.

Abdulla is a part of the founding team of the Decolonising Design initiative, collectively curated online platform that looks to put design pedagogies under a lens, touching on issues such as post-colonialism and decolonialism, feminism, queerness and activism and exploring how these fit in to modern understandings and teachings of design by way of articles, resources and events. She points it out that we often consider design and design education as “neutral”, where we should go further into the politics of design practice. “For far too long, designers have remained married to the concept that what we do is neutral, universal, that politics has no place in design,” says Abdulla. Yet the choices we make as designers are intrinsically political: With every design choice we make, there’s the potential to not just exclude but to oppress; every design subtly persuades its audience one way or another and every design vocabulary has history and context. Learning about the history of colonialism will open our eyes to how power structures have formed society today, and how they dominate our understanding of design.”

Both Abdulla and Harriss suggest that radical curriculum changes should be a necessary approach to diversifying design education. Another direction in this work is propose by Aisha Richards, a MA tutor in applied imagination in the creative industries in University of Arts, London, and director of the Shades of Noir (SoN) programme, supporting race equality and its presence in art, design and communication higher education.

In her “Embedding equality and diversity in the curriculum: an art and design practitioner’s guide” co-authored with Terry Finnigan, Head of Widening Participation at London College of Fashion, UAL, she highlights that although an increasing number of students from black and minority ethnic backgrounds are choosing to study creative subjects, the large majority of staff employed to teach the subject remain mainly white. Although this area has been researched for over fifteen years, however, only recently some concrete actions have been taken. “When you don’t have the diversity of staff to offer the diversity of perspectives to the diversity of students, this is where a big part of the problem lies,” she says.

Richards insists that the higher education institutions should focus on ensuring whether or not minority students are “valued in a way that means they complete their education successfully,” rather than just seeking out ways to enroll more such students. She sees solutions for this challenge in curriculum design, staff training, establishment of safe spaces and community support. These are, according to Richards, an important part of levelling a historically and systematically uneven playing field.

At UAL, Richards and Finnigan created a unit entitled ‘Inclusive learning and teaching in higher education’ (ILTHE), that encourages students (academic members of staff) to reflect on themselves and their practice. They are required to discuss a range of diversity and equality issues through a blog, study literature and write an essay illustrating their understanding of these topics, and then undertake a curriculum innovation linked to their professional teaching context, which has proved to be the most transformational component. It has created some very interesting and proactive outcomes, such as the support of critical thinking including critical race theory, creation of pedagogical interventions, and support of innovation through collaborative working practices.

At the same time, in her work with Shades of Noir, Richards has begun to implement change at UAL with the final goal of equal representation throughout all levels of the institution. Lobbying with UAL’s Group for the Equality of Minority Staff (GEMS) for equal representation on interview panels and committees. The next target is to get equal representation on all committee co-chairs.

SoN has recently begun working with other institutions and is actively seeking to share its expertise and collaborate nationally and internationally. SoN offers higher education a range of activities that support change in behaviour and practice, through an online resource database, debates, exhibitions, workshops, curriculum design, audits, validation and reviews. Described as art schools’ critical friend and movement for change, SoN aims to address a lack of embedded representation, cultural currency and accessible knowledge in the creative curriculum and pedagogy within art, design and communication higher education.

It is crucial that race and gender are only part of the picture. According to American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), the largest professional association of designers in the world, diversity in design means diversity of experience, perspective and creativity—otherwise known as diversity of thought—and these can be shaped by multiple factors including race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual identity, ability/disability and location, among others. Lack of diversity – both in education and in profession – leads to apathy, insensitivity and even discrimination. On the contrary, from a practical (not to mention ethical) standpoint, diversity and inclusion within the field of design lead to more innovation through problem-solving, whether in service to business or society. And that’s what design is all about.

The novel coronavirus is already upending higher education as we know it, with many universities and other higher education institutions all over the globe being forced into online teaching. This has led many evangelists of online learning to make ambitious statements that the new golden era of online education has finally come, not only for the time of the crisis but with a potential to replace the face-to-face teaching altogether in the future.  It is impossible to overlook online learning’s positive aspects; however, the way it is presented as a simple and practical solution might be misleading.

Kyungmee Lee, Lecturer in Technology Enhanced Learning, Lancaster University, points out that the current rapid global adoption of online education is astonishing. To promote social distancing during the pandemic, most universities all over the globe have placed their courses and are delivering their teaching online. Many South Korean universities have moved their teaching online, providing students with the required number of classes without face-to-face contact with educators. In the UAE, the ministry of education announced that university teaching in the country would move online. In Italy, all universities closed, switching to online learning. In the USA, colleges were among the first institutions to take drastic action in response to the virus, cancelling in-person classes and moving most or all coursework online. This global shift to online learning follows the example set by universities in China, where the outbreak first began.

Peter Mayo, Professor at the University of Malta and author of Higher Education in a Globalising World: Community engagement and lifelong learning, believes that the good thing about the current situation is that “ it makes those who are resistant to modern digitally mediated technology take the plunge, whether adequately trained for this purpose or not. Many academics from Greece, Italy, Cyprus and the UK revealed that online learning is a new experience foisted on unprepared academics. It might enable them to transcend archaic ways.”

According to Bloomberg, many elite colleges, including small liberal arts schools, have resisted online teaching by trumpeting their small classes, mentoring from professors, and extracurricular activities, mostly in order to justify their tuition cost, which can top $70,000 a year. Still, even they are forced by the pandemic to switch to distance learning for at least the rest of the school year.

The history of education is full of episodes whereby necessity led to ingenuity. Mayo recalls the “flying university” in Poland that appeared under Nazi occupation, when Polish universities went underground and operated as distance learning institutions, with material “flying” from one place to another. It was innovative and attested to the resilience of the Polish academic community, both students and professors, involved. However, the present crisis, Mayo goes on, resembles, in certain cases, the situation during the immediate post revolution literacy campaigns in Latin America and elsewhere when young literacy workers were rushed to the field without adequate preparation.

Today we see educators throughout the world urged, if not compelled, to carry out their teaching online, irrespective of their training for this purpose. Lee warns that although undoubtedly, “online learning can make university education more accessible, affordable, interactive and student-centred”, when carefully implemented, it is important to “set realistic understandings and expectations of how it can support students affected by coronavirus measures.” This is especially the case for universities that disregarded online education before the coronavirus outbreak. The Bloomberg cites Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation and a higher education consultant, who shares this concern: “Schools that haven’t historically embraced online education are now being forced into it. Rather than becoming a crowning moment for online education, this crisis could provoke a backlash.”

Basically, both academics and students may lack the training needed for quality online learning.  It is true that some higher education institutions have had adequate preparation for moving to online teaching, as a good percentage of their students are distance learning students. But it also should be mentioned that adequate training for teachers in this case implies that of a year’s duration. Describing the process of developing online course, Lee stresses that normally it involves a team of experts including academics, instructional designers, programmers and illustrators, who collectively follow systematic design processes. Still, Bloomberg refers to education technology researcher Bay View Analytics, saying that 70% of 1.5 million America’s faculty members have never taught a virtual course before.

This would mean that academics who have never taught online would be offering courses that have not been adequately developed. Many unprepared academics forced to suddenly adopt virtual learning  choose to read their lectures using a webcam and the same slides they used for face-to-face teaching as well as teach using Skype or software for videoconferencing to deliver the same lectures for the same 45 minutes. Phil Regier, the ASU dean, predicts that would be challenging to hold students’ attention in this case. “Here’s the first lesson,” he says. “There’s nothing more boring than a 45-minute video. They’re horrible; nobody can get through those.”

Lee also points out another problem connected with this simple ‘onlinification’: there are significant differences between presenting slides on projection screens in lecture theatres and on a smartphone screen. “The font size and page ratio of the slides needs to be carefully checked and revised to improve their readability,” she writes. “If course materials such as key texts are not properly digitised, students’ learning can be completely disrupted.”

This brings up another topic – student engagement. Retaining student interest in online learning can be even harder that in face-to-face classes – a fact proved by higher drop-out rates in online courses when compared to in-class teaching. Online learning can address mass students anywhere and at any time throughout the world, yet this form of delivery requires at least adequate access to high-speed internet from where they are self-isolated. This could be a problem for low-income students who do not have basic technological tools or for those in rural areas often lacking reliable internet access and videoconferencing capabilities. Some institutions in the US have responded to such concerns by expanding wireless internet hotspots into parking lots, allowing students without Wi-Fi at home to complete coursework and log in to online classes from their cars, but this looks more like a band-aid solution.

Researchers working on the use of online learning in higher education point out that dissatisfied students who find online learning inferior to face-to-face lectures may take action against universities. Thus, Lee provides an example of Korean students who, frustrated by the switch to online learning because of coronavirus measures, requested a refund of their tuition payment.

Another thing to be taken into consideration by academic staff is how to use modern technology in what Mayo calls “appropriate ways.” By appropriate ways he means avoiding the use of this technology as another surveillance mechanism: “Recorded sessions, ostensibly for the benefit of those who could not tune into the live session, can inhibit student participation in the discussions.” But as there are two parties participating in the remote learning process, Emma Pettit explores this topic at a different perspective in her article A Side Effect of Remote Teaching During Covid-19? Videos That Can Be Weaponized, after the head of the conservative political-action group Turning Point USA told college students whose professors had switched to online classes to share with Turning Point videos of “blatant indoctrination.”

During the ongoing crises, development of a plausible system of assessment and evaluation of student learning outcomes opens a new set of challenges. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, many academics are trying to “keep their instruction simple, and to communicate to their students that they care.” For that purpose, institutions have relaxed their grading policies, requiring the courses be graded pass/fail. Such a measure can only be accepted as a temporary one, while the spread of the virus implies the situation in higher education will not change in a couple of weeks. Alternative assessment methods are necessary, for after the crisis is over, the degree programme must be recognised and therefore all learning outcomes must still be achieved and demonstrated despite contingency measures that were in place.

All above said proves that going online has to be carefully planned, and faculty members at the front line of this movement need clear communication and a whole university approach. To May Lim, an associate professor at the Singapore Institute of Technology, shares their experience of educating in the time of coronavirus. She writes, “While some faculty members already had competencies in online or remote teaching in four areas – live streaming, pre-recorded teaching sessions, facilitating discussions in a digital platform and providing assessment and receiving feedback – much background preparation still had to be done to get academic staff, students and infrastructure ready for lessons to transition seamlessly into online learning.»

A lot of training in all shapes and sizes was carried out for lecturers, including face-to-face workshops, walk-in consultations, online training and self-help guides. The topics covered how to create narrated slides, how to run effective live streaming classes, how to design alternative assessments, and the use of online proctoring tools for assessments. Students were also provided with guides how to use the tools and much was said about self-management and managing procrastination in order to work with students’ motivation and engagement. What also helped is pulse checking done on a regular basis two weeks after the online replacement of the classes, which enabled further tweaks to improve the experience. At the same time, online meetings conducted with teaching staff to share experiences helped rectify common mistakes that were made.

All said, distant learning has a huge potential to grow into the dominant form of teaching in higher education despite all the challenges. However rapid implementation of online education as the expense of quality may result in online education being discarded after the coronavirus outbreak ends. Universities should consider online learning not solely as a way for them to survive this moment but also an opportunity to thrive in the future.

The phrases ‘eLearning’ and ‘Distance Learning’ are often used interchangeably, but they’re actually two separate entities. We’ve teamed up with experts, to help you see the differences between the two, and how they affect you as a learner. Here’s everything you need to know.

What Αre eLearning And Distance Learning? Before we look at the differences between the two, we need to understand what these two concepts actually are.

eLearning: this form of learning is designed to create an online communication between the teacher and the student. Many schools are now using eLearning in order to complement the learning that’s done in the classroom. For example, homework may be set online, or quizzes can be taken with the rest of the class. It’s a new way of learning that suits a lot of learners, both school-aged and adult. Tutor James Anderson at State of Writing says, “We use eLearning in order to connect with our students. They can connect with us online, and we can work with them to improve their writing skills”.

Distance learning: this concept is more about the distance between the student and the teacher, and how technology bridges that gap. Many universities are now offering distance learning degrees, where the student attends school through their internet. That means a student in Europe could attend an American university, without ever having to move. It also makes attending higher education much easier if you live in rural or remote areas.

How Learning Works Online. Both methods of learning are able to help learners get more out of learning, wherever they are. The methods are slightly different, but they can overlap.

eLearning is used in local settings, so distance isn’t as much of a factor. For example, a teacher may use a quiz app to test children in their classroom. They can all get involved, and it makes learning fun for them. As well as this, it gives teachers more options in how to create engaging lesson plans. It’s helpful for adult learners too. eLearning can be accessed anytime and anywhere, so it fits into most people’s busy schedules. The ease of access means more adults are taking online courses and classes, to learn skills to get ahead.

Distance learning, on the other hand, is designed in order to be accessible no matter where you are in the world. It covers issues such as accessibility problems, so students can attend basic classes. This can be through webcams or chat programs.

The Benefits Οf Both Systems. There are benefits to both eLearning and distance learning. If you’ve never considered either of them before, then here’s why you may want to look into it further:

eLearning

• Makes learning more interactive. Many learners are turned off learning as they feel they’re just being talked at in the classroom. eLearning makes the process much more interesting and interactive. Their input is needed, and it helps them retain information better.
• Is convenient for adult learners. As mentioned earlier, adults find learning much easier when they’re doing so through eLearning systems. For example, Via Writing has found adults coming to them to improve their grammar skills, during their free time.
• Is at the learner’s pace. The learner can take part in learning at their own pace. There are eLearning materials that can be accessed whenever they need to be, meaning that the learner doesn’t have to worry about falling behind, or being ahead of the rest of the class, as there’s no class to hold them back.

Distance Learning

• Offers cheaper education. Distance learning can be a great option if you’re looking to save money on your education. As you don’t have to move away to a different city or country, you’re saving a lot of cash. As well as this, you’re also saving money on the courses themselves, as they’re often cheaper.
• Offers you the chance to take classes wherever you are. No matter where you are, you can take classes. This option is popular with people who need to stay put at home, such as parents or people caring for family members. It takes the pressure off you to get to a place of learning, so you can concentrate on what you’re learning instead.
• Gives you the opportunity not to take part in the classroom setting. Some people find that the classroom setting isn’t for them. This could be due to a disability, or simply because they’ve never enjoyed conventional learning. Websites like Grammarix have seen an upswing of visitors who are looking to learn at their own pace.

As you can see, there’s actually a real difference between eLearning and distance learning. eLearning is a style of learning, while distance learning is a method of attending class even if you can’t be there physically.