Remote Learners, Home Makers: How Digital Fabrication Was Taught Online During a Pandemic
This addresses challenges in remote education for digital fabrication instructors and students, highlighting trade-offs and inequities, but it is incremental as it builds on existing remote learning models.
The study examined how digital fabrication courses adapted to remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, finding that using hobbyist equipment and online networks could emulate industrial workshops, with at-home fabrication enabling more iteration and machine tuning but also exacerbating student inequities.
Digital fabrication courses that relied on physical makerspaces were severely disrupted by COVID-19. As universities shut down in Spring 2020, instructors developed new models for digital fabrication at a distance. Through interviews with faculty and students and examination of course materials, we recount the experiences of eight remote digital fabrication courses. We found that learning with hobbyist equipment and online social networks could emulate using industrial equipment in shared workshops. Furthermore, at-home digital fabrication offered unique learning opportunities including more iteration, machine tuning, and maintenance. These opportunities depended on new forms of labor and varied based on student living situations. Our findings have implications for remote and in-person digital fabrication instruction. They indicate how access to tools was important, but not as critical as providing opportunities for iteration; they show how remote fabrication exacerbated student inequities; and they suggest strategies for evaluating trade-offs in remote fabrication models with respect to learning objectives.