Establishing a Virtual Makerspace for an Online Graduate Course: A Design Case

Abstract

This design case discusses key steps taken to establish a virtual makerspace for students enrolled in an online graduate course on informal learning. Two key design decisions are elaborated around (a) the selection of appropriate projects and packaged materials that distance education students can receive by mail to participate in making, and (b) the choice of an online platform for distance education students to document their design processes for assessment purposes and peer interaction and learning. This design case is relevant to a variety of online communities who may wish to engage in maker activities as well as isolated face-to-face communities or individuals who may not have local mentors to support informal making and could, therefore, benefit from online connectivity to an expert or peer support. To promote replication of the design, materials and community tools to support making among geographically dispersed makers are detailed.

Exploring Student Perceptions of Flipgrid in Online Courses

“…Given this, some online educators have focused on identifying ways to improve the use of asynchronous textbased communication in online courses-recognizing that many criticisms of it might be more about how we use them than the technology itself (Johnson, 2016;Kwon, Park, Shin, & Chang, 2019;Woods & Bliss, 2016). At time same time, others have investigated how technological advances, such as asynchronous video, might provide new ways for students to interact and communicate with each other (Delmas & Moore, 2019;Gurjar, 2020;Oliver, Moore, & Evans, 2017;Serembus & Murphy, 2020). However, questions remain about whether asynchronous video-based discussions in particular can address the problems students have with asynchronous text-based discussions Saçak & Kavun, 2020).…”

“…However, research to date has focused largely on VoiceThread and to a lesser degree Flipgrid. VoiceThread enables users to narrate and record presentations and then discuss these presentations using multimodal commenting tools (Ching, 2014;Dunlap & Lowenthal, 2011;Oliver et al, 2017). Online educators have been interested in using VoiceThread for multimodal discussions because of the potential of multimodal communication to "humanize" online discussions (Ching & Hsu, 2013;Koricich, 2013;Pacansky-Brock, 2012Trespalacios & Rand, 2015).…”

Informing Makerspace Outcomes Through a Linguistic Analysis of Written and Video-Recorded Project Assessments

“…Beyond creating video as an assessment artifact, created videos have also been studied as the basis for reflection which ties in with portfolios recommended for makerspaces and typically would include both artifacts and reflections (Oliver, Moore & Evans, 2017). Barry…”

Bridging distance: Practical and pedagogical implications of virtual Makerspaces

“…It can involve a virtual (i.e., Internet-driven or virtual-reality) environment to create, build and invent (Loertscher, 2015) that supports makers in direction, asking questions, sharing work, and giving and receiving feedback (Oliver, Moore, & Evans, 2017) while at a distance.…”

“…However, there is an emergence for the promotion of virtual makerspaces. This call addresses the issues of equity and access (Oliver et al, 2017) and the ubiquity of the virtual makerspace (Loertscher, 2015). For maker educators, a blend of online and face-to-face opportunities and resources is seen to afford different, yet complementary, experiences.…”