Graduate Diploma in Graphic Design students
I was unsure about how to measure the impact of the Technical sessions on the students.
A good start will be to measure the students’ feelings about their Graphic Design technical skills in the first session of the course. This course has students from different backgrounds, including social sciences, engineering, and other design areas such as Fashion Design. Because of this, they have different skills.
What I did was bring some tags and give one to each student. Anonymously, the students who wanted to participate wrote their feelings in the tags and gave them to me.
Of the 24 students, 16 participated (66.6%).
The results show:
Anxious – 6
Tired – 3
Curious – 4
Excited – 4
Confused – 2
As you can see from the image, there were also other startup feelings, such as happy, eager, and apprehensive. The only feeling I wasn’t expecting in the second week of their course was “Tired”; that is something to take into consideration, but it’s not related to their technical skills.
The other thing I wanted to know is how the students perceive their current technical skills in Graphic Design. To know this, I brought a board and made an informal chart where students anonymously had to point out their perception of their skills on a scale from 0 to 100. It was a bit harder to keep track of this one, but I would say that all of the students participated in this one.
As you can see in the image, the students tend to rate their technical skills on the upper end of the scale. This is an important thing to note, because the perception they have on their own skills is biased. In the first session, I could tell their skills were way lower than they thought. Which is normal considering it’s just the second week of the course. Because of this, to measure how they perceive their technical skills after the minicourse I designed for them, I want to make another chart like this one. After talking to my tutor, she suggested that this time they would measure their skills against what they answered in the first part of the exercise. I’ll do that part using tracing paper, placed on top of the first chart they made.
I also want to know how they are feeling after the sessions, so I will give them new tags to fill out anonymously. For me this is another way to map the student journey con the mini course based on their own feelings and perception. Words and/or pictures can map student journeys through the course to see what this reveals about the course structure. (Stephens, Salines,and Warner, (n.d.)
In one of the tutorials, one of my colleagues suggested I do an exercise to measure how they are applying the skills learnt during the minicourse.
For this session, I decided to design a workshop on poster design and experimental image-making. This will challenge their knowledge of design principles and also allow them to experiment with new techniques.
For this poster, they will have to use typography, composition, layout, hierarchy, contrast, and balance. Things that we have been covering in our sessions. The workshop will also help them to improve their creativity skills. A challenge should be approachable, understandable and actionable, and it should be clearly scoped—not too big or too small, not too vague or too simple. (IDEO, 2012).
References
IDEO (2012) Design Thinking for Educators: Toolkit. 2nd edn. Palo Alto, CA: IDEO.
Stephens, T., Salines, E. and Warner, C. (n.d.) Course Designer 3: Defining Course Aims. London: University of the Arts London, Teaching, Learning and Employability Exchange.