California Virtual Campus

by Christina Leverenzzi

Abstract
Graphic design as a field of endeavor is evolving at an extraordinary pace. Students and practitioners are facing unprecedented challenges and competition. The globalization of trade, the outsourcing of knowledge and skill-work, and the growth of the Internet that has made many skills obsolete, requires that we adapt new teaching methods that will reflect these changing realities. We must embrace online and hybrid courses that incorporate differentiated and multi-modal instruction so as to meet the needs of graphic design students in the 21st century. In this manner we can accommodate a diverse student body while building social capital.

It is the 21st century and the need for innovative teaching strategies and methods in the field of graphic design have become paramount for the economic survival and success of graduates and practitioners. While the technology and programs that we are using continue to evolve at a phenomenal rate, our methods of teaching and instructional delivery have changed very little since the early decades of the 20th century. In most of the nearly 2,000 graphic design programs in the United States we have allowed inertia to block the move to an e-learning format of instructional delivery. For many traditionalists the move will be traumatic; however, with mounting pressures from within our field, and from the need to react to external economic competition, our window of opportunity continues to shrink. The need to consider online graphic design courses is inevitable.

To understand what it means to take graphic design courses from the traditional f2f classroom to an online delivery mode, one must have some knowledge of the field and understand what graphic designers do. Graphic design is a field that attempts to “give visual form to ideas and concepts”. (Meggs, 1992, p. 121) Graphic designers are individuals who are employed by businesses to enlighten consumers as to the wonderful products or services that these businesses provide. While some form of graphic design existed as far back as the Renaissance (Meggs, 1992), it did not come into its own until the final decades of the nineteenth century (Ryan and Conover, 2004). The field grew at a modest rate until the end of World War II, with new graphic styles (Heller and Chwast, 1994, p. 155). Positions continued to be created in response to technological innovations.

The latter half of the twentieth century was the Golden Age in every area of graphic design. Starting in the 1950s, with the advent of television and the growth in other visual mediums of advertising, employment opportunities grew exponentially. Advertising was able to present product choices never before seen in the history of mankind.

Graphic design provided an excellent choice for visually and artistically talented individuals who could work under pressure. There was a great deal of creative freedom coupled with high pay and secure employment. The needs of businesses exceeded the pool of trained workers. Many individuals opened their own businesses. Graphic design became a breakthrough field of employment for women and minorities.

Ironically, many schools became victims of their own success. Corporate internships were abundant and many students took lucrative positions in lieu of graduation. The first tremors in the field were felt in the early 1990s with rapid advances in computer technology that radically changed or eliminated some old skills (i.e. typesetting). Many schools had an influx of displaced skilled designers who had to learn new ways of doing old tasks. This group was primarily made up of middle-aged white males who were able to take traditional classes with the support of strong unions and their employers. This displacement was of relatively short duration.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century there was a convergence of trends that was exacerbated by extraneous factors that completely altered the field of graphic design. The trends that have initiated these transmogrifications are the unprecedented growth of the Internet, the globalization of trade, and the outsourcing of knowledge and skill-work.

The growth of the World Wide Web and the Internet is probably the most important trend to emerge in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. As Brown (2002) states, it is a “transformative medium as important as electricity”. It not only allows instant access to the world but also to the human resources that exist worldwide. The Internet accelerated both the globalization of trade and the outsourcing of knowledge and skill work. The Internet never sleeps, and American corporations were now able to contact and utilize an around-the-clock, highly skilled, low-cost labor pool to support or even supplant in-house designers. Friedman (2005) points out that businesses will always gravitate to areas that have the most plentiful human resources with the least expensive labor (p. 36). The Internet allowed skill-work to be digitized (p. 109), and many of the lower level jobs migrated to the Internet.

By 2003 a second wave of displaced graphic designers began to return to school. These individuals fit Palloff and Pratt’s (2002) description of adults who were returning to “obtain the knowledge and skills to compete… in the workforce” (p. 181). This group was young, far more diverse, and many lacked degrees or advanced technical training and seniority. Many had been hired at relatively high salaries to fill a niche in a particular corporation or industry. They were forced to take specific courses that would allow them to retain employment or to obtain new jobs, often at much lower salaries than they had been used to. After 9/11, the whole field had experienced a reduction in workers. The return to the traditional classroom was not working out well for many of these displaced graphic designers. While employers wanted their employees to be able to update their skills, they were no longer willing to pay for employees to take off from work to be at school.

Publicly funded schools, in an attempt to assess the needs of employers and nontraditional students, sent out surveys and did extensive community needs assessments. Research showed the need for nontraditional asynchronous classes in a large number of technical areas, including graphic design.

Online graphic design programs need to be focused on three distinct target groups: Traditional students in their final semester(s) prior to graduation who are finding it necessary to obtain employment to stay in school; degreed professionals in the field of graphic design who have skills or degrees that are out-of-date; and niche graphic designers who lack certificates or degrees and now need credentials that employers are demanding. Each of these groups has particular strengths and weaknesses, specific learning styles, and differing needs and skills. It has been observed that their interactions are competitive and, at some times, antithetical to one another.

The traditional student is mostly what Raines (2002) would call Millennial. Born in the 1980s, they are multicultural, connected, goal and achievement oriented. In graphic design, they are definitely on the positive side of the digital divide. They have benefited from the fact that the “nonliterary popular culture has been steadily growing more challenging,” as different mental skills have been honed (Johnson, 2005, p. 23).

The niche workers are primarily Generation Xers who had the advantage of learning computers and new programs from their inception. This allowed them to enter a rapidly growing field with cutting-edge skills and to reap substantial financial rewards with limited credentials. Many of their niche-jobs have been outsourced and they need broader, more industry-wide skills and credentials.

The third group is made up of degreed professionals who are the youngest members of the Baby Boom Generation or are the oldest of Generations Xers. They have impressive credentials and work records, often are extremely talented artists and idea people; however, they lack computer and program skills that are now central to graphic design. They are unable to do the “multiprocessing” (Brown, 2006, p. 5) that the Millennials and many of the Gen Xers are engaged in on a daily basis. Too young to retire, retraining is a matter of survival.

Obviously, we are facing three disparate groups of learners. Each has its own existential base, learning styles, and specific goals. To integrate them in an online learning program will present many challenges. The need to build cooperation and social capital is a difficult, but not impossible task. To address and resolve conflicts before they arise several different strategies have been identified.

One strategy would involve the initiation of a mandatory one-day on-campus orientation session that would address technical and personal concerns. Lynch, (2001) exhibited the advantages of an orientation for all undergraduate students enrolled in an online program. There was a significant increase in technology related skills, self-learning skills, and communicative skills. The session also served to enhance the objectives of creating opportunities for interaction and communication between students, between students and instructors, and to tie course materials to their individual real-world activities (Lynch, 2001).

Another strategy is the use of hybrid courses, relying on differentiated instructional methods such as scaffolding, tiered-lessons, flexible grouping, multimedia lessons that connect subject matter with student interests and real life applications within the field, that will respond to the multiple intelligences. Gardner (2004, 1983). Gardner’s theory (1983) that we all possess eight or nine intelligences in varying degrees is particularly important when dealing with students from three different generations, who learn in different ways.

The use of differentiated instruction is based on two concepts. The first of these is redundancy in delivering instruction through text, visual demonstrations, and auditory offerings (DeBough, 2002). The second is the building of a student learning community through the creation of small groups comprised of individuals who possess “a mix of expertise levels and experience” (Cillay, 2003). The efficacy of these methods must be validated through the use of ongoing assessments, (Hall, 2002), and the engagement of all student learners in every activity.

Creating an online community and social capital among targeted learners will require what Betz (2004) calls collaborative learning teams. It would be advisable to create teams made up of four to five individuals with their membership drawn from the three separate learning cohorts. The combination of skills, experience, education, and learning styles will hopefully provide a synergistic online learning environment that will meet student needs, and will minimize unproductive conflict.

In the 21st century the field of graphic design is destined to change in ways that we cannot even imagine. We will have to rapidly adapt to the technological innovations and to the economic changes that have occurred over the last decade. These factors include the extraordinary growth of the World Wide Web and the Internet, the globalization of trade, and the outsourcing of knowledge and skill-work. At the same time, we must be proactive in our approach to the education of future graphic designers and to trends that will affect our domain.

In order to meet the educational needs of our current students and also the educational requirements of employed professional graphic designers we must consider the use of e-learning as a viable alternative to traditional classroom instructional delivery. Within our online offerings we must reach out to all of our learners through progressive strategies that include hybrid courses, the use of differentiated instruction, group interaction, and the creation of an online community of graphic designers.

References:
Betz, Muhammad K. (2004). Online Learning Teams: Indispensable Interaction . International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning , Retrieved January 19, 2007, from http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Jun_04/article03.htm

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