The purpose of the course Cross-Medial Laboratory is to enable the students to understand and account for media-related aspects of aesthetic and cultural processes of meaning. This entails being able to account for and analyse new and old forms of expression and the potential signification, similarity and difference in media. During the course, the students work in practice with select forms of media to get an in-depth understanding of their own products through theoretically informed reflection.
I wanted to ensure that the students worked in specific ways during the course and still learned something from their work even during the Covid-19 lockdown. In my course, the students had to read theoretical texts, understand a general theoretical framework, complete a practice exercise and understand this exercise through the theoretical framework. All of this should then strengthen their theoretical understanding. This is why I developed a new form of instruction adapted to the new circumstances.
The new form of instruction consists of three parts:
A contextualising lecture from the teacher recorded in Keynote with video and audio, which is shared in Dropbox.
Carefully scripted exercises for the students in Google Docs. The exercises are presented orally for the students in Blackboard’s (NB: Brightspace is now used) virtual rooms.
Feedback, which took place in Google Docs’ comments function and in Blackboard’s virtual rooms.
Specifically, the first two weeks of the lockdown took place in the following way, where I taught on Thursdays and Fridays.
First week:
On Thursdays, I sent out a recorded slideshow and a collective reading exercise in three steps (approx. 1.5 hours of work). The collective reading exercise concluded with small forms and reports of the day’s texts, which I corrected in Google Docs. Afterwards, the students had to correct and return them again.
On Fridays, we met in Blackboard’s virtual room (NB: Brightspace is now used) and discussed their answers. Their theory was about the aesthetic as a practice, so we talked about how the academic knowledge production is also a practice. It is something you do by reading, interpreting and applying the texts together. We also talked about historicity.
On the same day, I sent out the practice exercise ‘Listening to/in troubled times’ during a session in Blackboard’s virtual room (NB: Brightspace is now used). The exercise is based on one of the texts that the students had read (John Cage “Experimental Music”), and it is about listening as an aesthetic practice. The exercise was particularly relevant for lockdown, as you spend most of your time at home. Each student had to listen to the sounds in their home and share their sound experiences as a composition and curatorial text uploaded to Padlet.
Second week:
The second week took place in the same way: The students received a recorded slideshow again, which contextualised the day’s texts. On Friday, they had to prepare short presentations in groups that related the day’s texts to their practice/listening exercise.
They held their presentation on Friday in Blackboard’s virtual rooms (NB: Brightspace is now used). The presentations used personal experience as a point of departure. These were topics such as how listening practice can transform your sensory apparatus (e.g., in regard to one’s own home and the surrounding sounds), how technology and media can contribute to transforming senses, how the coronavirus crisis transforms our shared ways to sense: we now have to be ‘together at a distance’, but how can that be heard and sensed, and which challenges/opportunities arise from this kind of shared crisis? And what new shared forms of experience emerge from this crisis?
They discussed all this by involving key texts from media and art theory that they had read for two weeks and earlier in the course (McLuhan, Kittler, Walther Ong, John Cage, Caroline Jones, etc.)
Keynote: Presentation software used for recording lectures.
Dropbox: The recorded lectures were uploaded here and shared with the students.
Google Docs: Used to hand out exercises and feedback to students.
Blackboard (NB: Brightspace is now used): A virtual room was used for feedback and presentations. Alternatively, Zoom can be used.
Padlet: A digital bulletin board, where the students could share their experiences from the practical exercise.
We concluded with a mini evaluation. The students said that they were happy to get feedback directly from the teacher. They also thought that the recorded slideshow worked well. It was always available as a resource that they could access when they pleased, and not everyone was able to get the audio and video in the virtual meeting room to work. They also liked the practice exercise, especially in the context of Covid, which made their knowledge topical. This is especially important for Aesthetics and Culture students, who are schooled history to apply it to their own age.
My advice is that during a crisis, it’s better to use the tools you already have instead of developing new ones. This made it more manageable for me, since I knew the ways of working from prior experience. For other teachers, it might be less manageable.
The students were very happy with getting specific feedback from the teacher. During ‘normal’ courses, it hard to find time for feedback when everything is set up for a three-hour lecture in a classroom. In the future, I might sometimes choose to shorten my lectures to have more time for feedback.
