Creative Sustainability: An asynchronous studio unit

Design thinking has gained a lot of popularity over the past decade in disciplines outside of design for its ability to tackle complex challenges.

There is also a growing recognition that we need new approaches and creative thinking to address global environmental challenges such as sustainable development and climate change.

An opportunity to combine these two areas was recognised to enable students to explore how designs structured creativity approaches may be applied to address environmental sustainability challenges.

Creative Sustainability is an asynchronous online studio unit that engages students in practical project-based design tasks which explore creative thinking within environmental sustainability contexts.

Students have said that the activities were interesting and challenged them to creatively think about environmental sustainability challenges. Students have provided valuable feedback about how the unit could be improved by including more interaction with other students through small group activities and more interaction with the teaching staff through short ‘live’ synchronous sessions. Both of these were implemented in the latest unit refinement.

1. Identify the unit's core learning outcomes and how you want to assess those.
2. Identify suitable activities that would help a student achieve the learning outcomes and would also be fun to complete in an asynchronous online unit.
3. Design, prototype and test each activity prior to launching the unit.
4. Model good online behaviour by demonstrating it yourself (e.g. record a video yourself as an example for how you would expect students to do it).
5. Create a mix of computer-based and practical ‘hands-on’ activities.
6. Create a mix of individual and small-group activities.
7. Ask students for feedback regularly to know where activities can be improved.

Some advice that I would give to anyone looking to create an online asynchronous design studio unit is that learning shouldn’t just replicate on campus classes as it will often fall short. The advantages of online asynchronous learning which are most important to your unit should be identified early in the process so that you can focus on designing for them during development. Advantages to online asynchronous learning may include:

• flexibility for students to learn at their own time and speed
• facilitate learning across different locations and time zones
• standardise content delivery across large cohorts and
• invite guest speakers where applicable.

	Design collaborative tasks Online asynchronous units don’t have to be an isolating experience. Many students want to engage in collaborative tasks as long as they are provided with the capacity and resources to do so. This is more challenging in online asynchronous environments and requires more careful set up, instructions and support. Activities can be conducted away from a computer. From my experience, students have really enjoyed opportunities to complete tasks away from a computer screen and then share their outcomes with the class by uploading them as images or videos.
	Testing is essential It's essential to prototype and test activities in an online asynchronous unit as you cannot rely on adapting an activity ‘on-the-fly’ as you could in a studio-based classroom. Develop an activity and run it by a colleague or friend for feedback before rolling it out with students.
	Get student feedback Ask students for regular feedback the first few times you run the unit as there will always be things that can be improved.