When contemporary art meets biomedicine fully online and there are no right answers

The approach

The approach the team has taken in developing this subject as a fully online is to create a curated suite of 6 ‘signature’ podcasts, hosted in the LMS and produced by Learning Environments learning designers and video production teams. The podcasts feature the six artists in ‘conversation’ with six Melbourne biomedical experts and the two subject coordinators exploring the modules’ key themes. At time of writing, Contemporary Art and Biomedicine: Looking Making Thinking is finishing its third iteration.

The six featured artists include alumni such as Professor Patricia Piccinini and Yhonnie Scarce; and the biomedical professionals include Professor Peter Doherty and Director of the Doherty Institute, Professor Sharon Lewin. The subject coordinators are Professor of Pharmacology, Gary Anderson, and VCA academic and Margaret Lawrence gallery curator, Doctor David Sequeira. The module topics range from ‘Stem cells and chimera’, to ‘Breathing and lungs’, to ‘Identity and personhood’. The ‘signature’ aspect of the subject is its showcasing of Melbourne University research and artistic expertise.

Contemporary Art and Biomedicine was designed and developed over a seven-month period The learning design approaches, taken from both a learning design perspective and a student learning perspective, were a mix of Community of Inquiry (Garrison 1996), Inquiry-based Learning, and Transformative Learning (Mezirow 2000). This was not the result of potluck or intuition, but from the subject coordinators (David, Gary) and the Learning Environments learning designer (Dr Julian Harris) research into Yale and Harvard Medical School examples and, crucially, anticipating the kind of concern from early biomedical students that gives this show case its title: It’s tricky when there’s no right answer at the end. The assessments (and their dependent Discussions) called for detailed description, interpretation, analysis, argument and, ultimately, creation of contemporary works of art.

Teaching and learning: asynchronous online learning sequences

Each of the six LMS modules followed an identical structure or asynchronous online learning sequence. There were only 4 x one-hour synchronous Zoom sessions across the semester. In keeping with the pedagogies above, modules began with a version of the question: What does Contemporary Art have to do with Topic X? The answer could, of course, be nothing, as David Sequeira reminded students at the outset of podcast recordings, or it could be everything depending on how students constructed arguments, or it might be somewhere in between.

Specifically, the accumulative learning sequences in each module supported students to explore more about the module’s artist and their work and the medical researcher and their expertise through diverse activities like collaboratively reading of a short article, viewing a recorded performance and responding to prompts, typing a short answer in a text area and comparing this with a triggered model response. On the third LMS page of each module, the podcast is embedded from Kaltura, following an interactive vocabulary exercise.

Podcasts and LMS Discussions: What happens to lectures and tutorial in the asynchronous fully online subject?

The podcasts did not ask or answer the question of what Topic X in the opinion of Artist Y or Expert Z had to do with that module’s guest artist and their work. The guests were interviewed separately by David and Gary; the raw recordings were listened to and discussed by David, Gary, Luis (Learning Environments – video production) and Julian. As the video production team edited a podcast episode down to c. 40-50 minutes, Gary, David, Julian devised complementary learning activities, including those mentioned, as well as LMS quizzes and Discussions.