Find out about my 'You Choose - Creativity Bank Project' in the below short film.
Or scroll down to discover more...
For the ‘You Choose ?‘ element of my PGCert E-Portfolio I decided to follow up on a creativity bank project that's been on my agenda for a while.
Background
When I initially started teaching I taught students how to use the Adobe creative suite (Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign) for all their creative needs in Fashion marketing and buying degree specialisms from designing reports in InDesign to drawing up fashion CAD flats in illustrator. I would spend hours teaching the same tutorials (often multiple times a day) then having to re-show students in the future once they had forgotten the skills after a few months. Over time, I started to record some of my workshops so students could watch them in their own time and more importantly re-watch later on in the future. Within a few years I had collected a bank of tutorials that I published to a very basic youtube channel that students could visit whenever they needed creative support.
Fast forward to the past year as we moved to emergency online teaching - I knew that trying to do a live creative session over zoom would be far too hard for students to follow and for me to monitor who was following and more importantly who wasn't. I spent some time looking through linked-in learning and searching for existing tutorials that could teach students a lot of the skills I was spending hours on. Even more beneficial was that some of these tutorials also gave students certificates upon completion allowing students (especially first years with not too much experience) to populate their CV’s with awarded new skills.
While there is still a place for creative tutorials delivered by a tutor on the course - these can be more based on how to create layouts and brand reports rather than spending hours delivering creative content. This will also help elevate the students' creative skills even further.
This led me to think about how we could set this up to make it easier for students to access. In the past we have always mentioned to students to source extra skills by searching for tutorials in linked-in learning, lynda.com, youtube and so on. However, very rarely do students actually independently seek to upskill themselves independently. They are often overwhelmed with the amount of tutorials that show up on a search or put off by how long some of them are. For example, lots of the fashion CAD flat tutorials are 4 hours plus while the one I created for students is little over 20 minutes.
I think there is a real opportunity within FBBM and other courses to create subject specific creativity banks. Ideally these would be located as an independent section on Aula. Inside them would be a list of their units listed with created and curated tutorials relevant to that topic. As this is built and developed it may even be that some tutorials can be shared across different subjects. For example, drawing up CAD flats would definitely be used by FBBM, fashion design, accessories and possibly promotion too.
This is how the current YouTube channel looks:
A list of all the units
Students can then click on a unit title and access tutorials I have created
Then choose one and watch and at their convenience
However there are limitations to adding external content to this due to Linked-in learning being a subscription site that I can't add to these playlists. Therefore creating this on Aula, in a designated area seems obvious. I have mocked up the below to illustrate how I would like it to look.
How I would like the 'creativity bank' to look as a space on Aula...
Action Plan
How could this project be put into practise?
- Talk to the FBBM team
- Talk to Lee to get the go-ahead...
- Talk to other course leaders about doing the same thing on other courses AND how we can share content that's applicable to multi-courses e.g. Designing Fashion CAD flats
- Talk to Aula about getting the Creativity Bank set up on the platform
- Pilot it with year one in September for the FBBM trend forecasting and mapping units
- Get feedback and review
- Look at rolling it out live across Ravensbourne September 2022?