MOOC to Creative Accomplishment: Digital Portfolios & Certifications on Kadenze.com
Description
The session examines the opportunities and challenges that online art portfolios present to artists. Kadenze is a MOOC platform that brings together an alliance of the world's leading arts institutions, allowing students to take courses for both digital certification and college credit. The Kadenze platform presents an opportunity to combine arts education, practice, and community, with the ability to represent artistic work online in a digital portfolio. Combining the portfolio with a MOOC creates new ways to share student work, facilitate discussion, and provide constructive feedback.
Takeaway
The session will show the Kadenze portfolio, how it integrates with student coursework, how meta data such as certifications can be associated with the portfolio, how it can be used to foster discussion around student work, and how we might begin to develop a new set of feedback tools unique to an online educational space.
Abstract
Digital profiles/CVs simplify the process of sharing work. Traditionally, an art student builds up a body of work during their studies, and then uses a physical portfolio as a way of showing their work to others. However, the advent of digital portfolios has greatly simplified this process, and has empowered artists by allowing them to rapidly update their portfolio. The internet furthers these ideas by providing a digital gallery for the portfolio, allowing others to easily discover new work, and opening up new opportunities for artists. While these tools allow artists to share their work, they also introduce new challenges: Are all artists expected to maintain a custom online portfolio, requiring the use of web tools that may not be familiar to them? Once the portfolio is available, how are other people to find it? How are potential employers to evaluate disparate portfolios? Kadenze offers a solution to these questions by empowering artists to both develop their skills and share their work. Founded in 2013, Kadenze is a MOOC platform that brings together an alliance of the world's leading arts institutions, allowing students to take courses for both digital certification and college credit. As with traditional arts institutions, the student work produced in Kadenze courses is well suited for display in a student portfolio. With this in mind, Kadenze provides a portfolio space where students can share their work, both on Kadenze.com and with the outside world.
The Kadenze.com digital portfolio has several advantages over traditional portfolios. Firstly, the portfolio work will often be from Kadenze courses, allowing for certification, class rank, and other meta information associated with the work. This provides a means to compare different portfolios, as well as understand how a student work was created given the constraints of a coursework. Secondly, the portfolios are part of the larger Kadenze community, allowing students to share their work with their peers, comment on the work of others, and draw inspiration from the other works of art. As a platform, this helps the online MOOC experience mirror the on-campus experience, where inspiration and interactions happen not only within individual classes, but also within the larger community. Lastly, the portfolio system is fully integrated into the Kadenze.com platform, allowing students to easily curate their portfolio without distracting them from creating their art and learning new skills.
Additionally, the Kadenze platform generates custom feedback for student coursework. The feedback creates interesting supplementary media that can be shared within the digital portfolio, extending the value of the digital portfolio space. This feedback can be as simple as a visualization of the submission, displaying the work’s internal structure and form, or as complex as interactive applications that recontextualize the submission, allowing a student to juxtapose their work with transformations of their submission or the work of others. This reflective process is a critical part of learning in the arts, with this particular approach being unique to the tools of a digital platform like Kadenze.