In a typical semester, the Bok Center’s Learning Lab hosts an array of workshops and hackathons on a wide range of skills, including photography, game design, animation, and infographics. These workshops help students in Bok-supported courses complete assignments and capstone projects. The Learning Lab Undergraduate Fellows (LLUFs) are central to these efforts, having spent a year or more developing technical skills that they share with their peers. The mid-semester transition to remote learning disrupted the typical role that LLUFs play in delivering workshops and hackathons, but even at a distance, we are happy that they have been able to support their peers by creating online resources.
For students in courses with rich media projects, LLUFs have created resources on “Creating a Podcast in Garageband,” finding the best website building tools, advanced video editing techniques, and more. The Adobe Creative Suite has been of particular interest, as Adobe has made all of its professional applications free for student use during the quarantine. LLUFs have created tutorials in which they use applications like Photoshop and After Effects to show their peers how to achieve some pretty remarkable work.
Additionally, a number of LLUFs have produced resources that help students and faculty cope with the new teaching and learning environment, whether it’s mastering the Art of Zoom, finding all the “free stuff” that’s available to students learning remotely this term, or keeping a community of friends together by hosting a watch-party, maybe for a film class, but maybe just for fun.
One of the special things about these resources – resources created by students for students – is that learning is happening on both sides of the “transaction.” The students in the courses Bok supports are learning, but so are the LLUFs, as they’ve indicated to us in written reflections this term. Julie Tassanari ‘23 writes, “Producing resources as a LLUF is empowering. I love diving into the learning process, encountering challenges and finding unique ways to solve them, and then using what I’ve learned to create something that will help others.” Sophie Bauder ‘21 argues that, “Preparing tutorials for beginner coders pushes me to reflect on basic techniques and skills, which are easy to forget the deeper into coding you get.” And Elmer Vivas Portillo ‘20 reflects on the fact that the creation of these resources is a “dual-learning opportunity: both for me as the content creator and for the recipient of the information”; the process allows him to be both a teacher and a student at once.