This webinar is part of our 2021 CPD webinar sessions. Participants will earn an ALT CPD Open Badge which can be used as evidence towards accreditation via one of the pathways in ALT’s CMALT framework. 

If you missed a previous CPD webinar, recordings are available over on Youtube. 

Presenter:    Neil Hughes

The recent proposal by the Johnson government to cut funding for Arts subjects at universities by 50% is just the latest in a long line of attacks aimed at diminishing the place of the Arts and Humanities within the Higher Education sector. As well as putting limits on learning, this approach threatens, paradoxically, to do significant damage to the national economy given the £84 billion the Arts sector contributes annually to the UK economy or the 1.7 million British jobs it provides.

While it is important to counter such attacks politically through lobbying, petitions and other forms of activism, it is also crucial to demonstrate the value that the Arts and Humanities can bring to areas of activity not normally closely associated with them. This paper constitutes one such attempt. In it, I explore the contribution ideas and concepts from the Arts and Humanities such as ethics, discourse, rhetoric, visualisation and aesthetics can make to the field of online and blended learning design. This includes, but is not limited to, the role that such ideas might play in the evaluation of effective online learning design, their influence in shaping the way that learners think and feel about their learning and finally how these concepts can be harnessed to stimulate action effective for learning.

It concludes by interrogating the idea that the best of all worlds might, in fact, be one in which learning designers draw on frameworks and ideas from all of the main disciplinary areas (Arts, STEM, Social Sciences, Education) to create the conditions optimum for student learning.