The virtual studio

This is an applied research paper in one of the leading international refereed journals dealing specifically with the study of art and design educational methods. The research questions it addresses are to what extent can online activities supplant face-to-face teaching and learning in practice based arts subjects? What are the implications for staff loadings, unit costs and student support needs? These are significant questions for domains traditionally employing small number atelier style teaching models but now grappling with the demands of larger numbers and resource levels more appropriate to lecture based teaching. These questions were investigated by parallel comparative trials of online and face-to-face cohorts of students using a variety of qualitative and quantitative data collection instruments: questionnaires, focus groups, interviews and student assessment scores. This is a rare example of an attempt to teach the practice as well as the theory elements of a creative subject online and of an evaluation design in which the face-to-face and online versions were delivered simultaneously, hence its acceptance by a major journal publisher: Blackwell. The breadth of interest in this research is indicated by the fact that various aspects of the study and its conclusions were accepted for presentation at international conferences (ALT-C Sheffield UK and ICICTE Samos, Greece). The specific project reported here was one element of a large scale institution-wide e-campus initiative led by the principal author. This wider initiative has been reported widely (eg.Brown S. 2002 Re-engineering the University