Scaffolding online collaborative critiquing for educational video production

Abstract

In art, design and media education, learning from examples has been an established way to coach students. To derive greater benefits, teachers should get students to go beyond mere studying of examples. This paper focuses on engaging novice learners in collaborative critiquing of real examples of professional work and past student work in the context of producing an educational video project. While critiquing of such works is not new in art education, there is however scant literature on how to involve students in collaborative critiquing in an online environment involving video projects. A four-step critique model was therefore designed as procedural scaffolding and implemented in an online system, Knowledge Community. A group of Singapore pre-service teachers were engaged in online collaborative critiquing of videos before they embarked on their video projects to illustrate what constitutes good and bad video production. This research points to the value of online collaborative critiquing as a way to facilitate novice designers’ progress towards expertise. In this environment learners are able to look at problems through multiple perspectives, generate their own solutions and build knowledge that uses the overlapping expertise of the online community.