Intro to Digital Arts redesign

Goal

We redesigned this entry course around the real reasons students struggle in it, and measured what students actually learned rather than how much content was added. This is the program’s lowest-success course, so more students finishing was part of the goal. So was the deeper test: whether a student who had never opened Illustrator leaves having produced original work, knowing where to find help, and intending to take the next course.

A ground-up redesign of AVC 100, Introduction to Digital Arts, the program’s highest-enrollment entry course and one of its lowest in student success. It is a one-credit, half-semester foundation course, rebuilt around student support, connection, and belonging, and packaged as a clean IMSCC file that imports straight into Canvas with accessibility built into every page.

Audience

Students from across the college, not only digital arts majors. Some are new to college, many have never taken a fully online course, and some are just filling a one-credit elective. What they share is landing in a short course with a heavy software load to learn, so it has to work as an on-ramp for a wide range of students and keep them enrolled and moving through the high-risk early weeks.

That range sits inside a specific population. the college is a Hispanic-Serving Institution: about 44 percent of its students are Hispanic or Latino, many the first in their family to attend college. Basic-needs pressure is real and local: the college’s Dean of Student Life reports that 44 percent of the college students are food insecure. The same classrooms hold adult learners returning to school later in life, student veterans, and a high share of students managing ADHD and other disabilities. A course that ignores those realities loses exactly the students it should be reaching, which is why the support sequence is built into the course rather than offered on the side.

Process

The course runs on three small, connected projects, one in each tool, Illustrator, then Photoshop, then After Effects, carrying a single subject the whole way so the three add up to one cumulative piece rather than disconnected exercises. The projects are kept deliberately simple: each one gets a student into a professional application and produces a real result, without trying to teach any of the three fully.

A course like this is easy to overbuild, because it puts three professional applications in front of a beginner at once. The scope is held to what the instruction and work hours of a one-credit course actually allow, three simple projects rather than three mini-courses in software that each take a semester to master. Every one of these applications is intimidating to a newcomer, so each project is sized to reach a real result without the software becoming the reason a student quits. The course also teaches more than which buttons to press: students learn a working process, sketching on paper before they touch the computer, the vocabulary of the field, and the transferable basics of design and image-making that carry across any tool.

It ends in a finished project they post to their own portfolio, the same portfolio they keep building in every course after this one. Every project closes with the same four-step critique on Discord: post early, give feedback to at least four classmates, log the feedback given, then submit the final board. We wove student-support touchpoints into the first weeks as short lessons that walk students into advising, tutoring, disability services, and the campus basic-needs hub, the college CARES. The design draws on the persistence literature, Tinto on integration and Astin on involvement, and on institutional survey data on why students leave: optional support is least used by the students who most need it, so we built it into the course rather than offering it alongside.

Technology

• Learning-science foundation: backward design from measurable outcomes, constructive alignment of assessment to those outcomes, Universal Design for Learning, WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility, and the persistence research (Tinto on integration, Astin on involvement) behind the embedded support sequence.
• Built as an IMSCC package that imports into any Canvas LMS shell, so another instructor can adopt it without rebuilding.
• WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility audited in Canvas with YuJa Panorama and CidiLabs UDoIt.
• Instructional video recorded and captioned in Canvas Studio, so every instructor video is accessibility-checked.
• Tableau institutional-research dashboards, which flagged AVC 100 as a high-enrollment, low-success course and set the priorities for the rebuild.
• Assessment on real instruments: a Google Forms pre-and-post survey mapped to the course outcomes, built and deployed with Google Apps Script, and Canvas analytics for participation and grade trends, read every term.
• Student-facing tools: Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and After Effects, across the one carried project.
• Discord and Miro for critique, planning, and community.

Outcomes

The student-support sequence carries the college’s Personal and Community Well-Being outcome, whose criterion asks that a student demonstrate how to access institutional resources. That is precisely what those touchpoints already require, so the rubric simply states what the work was for. It is worth doing here rather than in a capstone: an outcome assessed only inside the major produces data describing majors alone, and this course is full of students who will take one art class and never take another.

The redesign is evaluated against its stated aims rather than against completion counts alone, using a pre and post design.

There is early completion evidence as well. Across two small summer sections, the share of students who finished rose from 44 percent to 60 percent after the redesign. It is a small sample and a modest gain, but it moved in the direction the redesign intended, and the fuller before-and-after will come from Institutional Research.

An end-of-course survey was administered to the first section in its final week. It measures the outcomes the course was built to move: whether the software still feels intimidating, whether students produced original work in each program, whether they intend to enroll in another course that uses the software, whether they know where to find help at the college, whether the course prompted contact with a campus service, and whether the workload fit the hours a one-credit course may require. A week-one baseline is added in the fall so that subsequent cohorts can be compared against their own starting point.

These responses come from the students who completed the survey, and are one strand of evidence, read alongside the unsolicited reflection below and the persistence research the design rests on, rather than a full account of the course’s effect. Within that group, the results align with the redesign’s aims: the two targeted measures, apprehension toward the software and knowing where to find help, both moved in the intended direction between the first week and the end of the term.

End-of-term measures of confidence, intent to continue, and belonging were also high.

Several students had already contacted or investigated a campus service as a result of the course, the specific behavior the embedded support sequence is designed to produce. Students rated instructor feedback and the Discord community the most helpful components of the course.

One qualitative signal preceded the survey. A student in the first section published the following reflection in their own portfolio, for their own audience rather than for the instructor, unsolicited and unprompted. It is quoted anonymously, with their permission.

I felt such a sense of community within the Discord and I enjoyed making art with my peers. I’ve always wanted to get into After Effects for video editing, but never quite knew how to start. All I had was Clipchamp and iMovie. This was a great way to get me started on that path, and I look forward to learning more.

I’m very eager to keep pursuing the Visual and Performing Arts in the future, even if I’m currently in Computer and Information Technology. Art and animation have been my true loves for a long time, and I’m happy that I’m getting closer and closer to becoming the animator and game developer that I want to be.

A single unsolicited response is not a finding. But because it was written for the student’s own audience rather than for the course, it carries little risk of a courtesy effect, and it independently names the three outcomes the redesign was built to produce: connection to peers, reduced apprehension toward the software, and the intention to continue.

Status

Built and taught. The redesign ships as an IMSCC package that imports into any Canvas shell, and it has already run with students, the survey and reflection above are from the first sections. It stays in iteration as the foundation course in the program’s portfolio-from-day-one chain.