2. How can you adjust your planned learning activities to meet the needs of your learners if an unexpected event occurs? (for example, a pandemic arises and many of your employees must now work from home – how will you ensure that they can still do their jobs? What training will they need, and how will you deliver it, knowing they must remain at home?)

As we enter more progressive times, inclusive learning becomes more prevalent to schools and resources. However, Visual Arts has remained relatively untouched for many years, and even in the midst of the Covid 19 crisis, remains to be one of the most unchanged topics I have ever seen. If you take a Visual Arts course at Uvic, students still have to go to school and be in classroom environments and have studio time. It seems the only real change to art classes has been no sharing of art supplies, use the same work-station, and the 6ft apart rule.

So what would happen in the event that my groups assignment had to be online, when even university courses take every possible measure to avoid this scenario?

Inclusive Education Canada indicates that inclusive design is about undoing hardships. There is no doubt that online art classes is a downgrade from an in-person experience with an instructor. I believe the higher the level of art course, the worse this loss is, as art courses become increasingly more complex and require more in-depth surveillance. For a university level painting course for example, they teach you the correct posture for painting standing up, which is required for making any large paintings. If you do not use the correct form, you could hurt yourself standing for multiple hours painting. A zoom class may not be enough to allow the teacher to see what their student is doing and correct them before they injure themselves. However, this is only true when we look at the possibilities in traditional media and not digital media.

So I believe if my groups resource had to be conducted online, it would then be required to change the medium. Since painting requires supervision, and group painting is impossible behind a screen, it stands to suggest that the next step forward would be to switch to digital painting. There are many online programs, most free, designed to replicate realistic painting in an online environment, programs such as Paint-tool Sai or Gimp which allow students to create art in a way that can be supervised and taught much like traditional painting but at a fraction of the cost. Switching to full online could still be conducted through zoom with screen sharing, with live demonstration and follow-along methods to learning that could then be transferred into real painting later, as well as introduce students to a new and often over-looked kind of art making. Furthermore, allowing the use of digital media comes with all kinds of accessibility tools, like colorblind filters, described audio, subtitles, and more. I believe that art can be transferred into the digital world, but only when the art itself is digitally harnessed.