The covid-19 pandemic has created a sudden and unanticipated challenge for educators around the world who had to turn into emergency online instruction. At the beginning there was really no time to think and reflect on its impact. We could only act and do our best drawing from past teaching experience. As a tutor with considerable experience in teaching art related courses offered in the context of postgraduate distance learning programs, I was confident in my technical and pedagogical expertise to teach in an imposed distance-learning environment that became inevitable due to health and safety measures. But my undergraduate students were not as prepared as me; they were first time online learners studying to become primary school teachers who had varying perceptions towards art’s importance as well as varying perceptions of confidence in their practical art skills.

This presentation focuses on the way a visual arts education course in the context of a Bachelor degree in Primary Education was restructured to ensure active learning, a sense of ownership in students’ learning as well as growth of pedagogical content knowledge, competences and skills in art making and art responding. Course activities and resources were reconfigured and redesigned to accommodate learners’ needs but also to utilize the affordability of the course Learning Management System platform that enabled synchronous and asynchronous engagement and interaction. Although the presentation focuses on a case study, this is not a traditional research-oriented case study. It unfolded as the semester was progressing and there was an urgent need to constantly reflect on the learning and teaching experience that was taking place.

Despite not being a traditional research case study, the data is quite overwhelming because of the mode of learning; an impressing volume of work was accumulated in the course LMS platform by the end of the semester. It comprised of text base and video base resources, including presentation files, readings, recordings of lessons, tutorials, image files, lists of free access software for visual expression, etc. Activities required students to contribute by uploading readymade images and artworks that drew their attention, photographs of their visual explorations and artworks, their digital portfolio and their reflections. Some activities were more interactive than others; students were invited to participate in forum discussions, to share images/ artworks / visual explorations and to offer feedback to their classmates.

The implications of the study relate to ways of passing control to learners, supporting their growth in visual arts education, maintaining collaboration and communication and deepening their commitment in their learning despite remote learning. These are important issues for providing inclusive distance education but also for rethinking conventional teaching which may not get back to its normality as we knew it before the pandemic. Rethinking our practices and planning for effective hybrid education models may become our new normality. We may also need to renew our vision of education in order to develop more democratic and just societies.