We may be in lockdown – but the teaching goes on

It’s one of a number of inventive ways that lecturers are finding to continuing teaching while under the Coronavirus lockdown.

Michael Williams, senior lecturer in the School of Sports and Service Management, had been planning to take students studying event operations and project planning at Brighton Business School to Preston Park to develop a site plan, identifying performance area, catering, and toilets for Brighton Pride. 

He said: “As we couldn’t visit the site in person, I used Google Earth to take the class on a virtual tour. I set up channels within the class so that students could work in small groups on their laptops and iPads to complete the activity.

Mark Williams

Google Earth park tour screenshot

“Students joined the tour from around locations around the globe including South Africa, Dubai, Taiwan, UK, Hong Kong and Poland.

“This worked really well and students enjoyed the virtual visit – I plan to do this again but to visit others locations including Stade de France in Paris.

Michael said the virtual site visit formed part of a series of activities focusing on the Brighton Pride event: “We have been using Pride as a case study for event operations and project planning and have been working with event management company ‘Wilde Ones’, who are responsible for the production for Pride.

“Following the site visit we were due to host Matt Saunders from Wilde Ones as a guest speaker to share his experiences of planning and managing the production for Brighton Pride. As this could not happen in person, we are hoping that Matt can join us on MS Teams.”

Meanwhile, Nick Gant, principal lecturer in the School of Architecture and Design, has been using technology not just for remote mentoring of students but to continue with a co-learning research consultancy project with creative leaders across 10 African Countries..

The Circular Design Lab project, commissioned by The Ellen MacArthur Foundation and The British Council, is continuing by way of  open mapping and community connection software on the creative agency Community21. It has been exploring remote community networking across ‘multi-local’ communities for 10 years. 

Nick, Founder of the creative agency Community21, said: “As the crisis has unfolded our methods have not changed, whilst access to materials and interactions on the ground in the different countries have changed radically. 

“During Easter I will be communicating with network in Nigeria and Sierra Leone to exchange experiences of the virus’ impact to grass-roots sustainable development there.

“And last week we were given access to recent images of a project in South Africa where our students and staff have been remotely co-learning how to transform waste into new opportunities for social cohesions, education and cultural engagement, as well as economic opportunities, over the last four years.” 

Nick’s colleague Stefano Santilli in the School of Art presented this work, co-developed with Dr Ryan Woodard, last month at Making Futures Conference in the Philippines. His trip was funded by The British Council and he made it back the day before the lock down. 

“We are feeding these findings back through a range of research fora – but our students (on 3D, MASD and Product Design) are benefiting from these ‘live' projects that explore remote knowledge nets for productive communities of practice.  

“We are planning a new open project for students across the school next year which will link students to this network which will enable the testing of remote knowledge exchange to the network including 50 schools across Malawi and Mozambique.”