Twenty-eighth International Conference on Learning

Abstract

It’s a well-known phenomenon that today college students are shunning liberal arts, which was traditionally the main purpose of college—to teach deeper understanding, critical thinking, and writing. The decreasing number of undergraduates pursuing bachelor’s degrees in liberal arts has led to the downsizing of liberal arts programs/departments and the weakening of liberal arts in Undergraduate General Education curriculum, which is also the result of academic prioritization promoting more job-oriented disciplines. Therefore, this experiment of integrating liberal arts component into web design courses was initiated to help fill the gap, and this practice has been successful. Branching out from a problem-solving and technological-focused pedagogy, this method serves a higher learning purpose—to prepare students for life, in addition to teaching marketable skills. In our two undergraduate web design courses, students have the opportunity to practice the five major steps of web design workflow—research and goals, site architecture and content creation, wireframing and design mockups, production and web development, launch and assessment. The liberal arts approach occurs in the first two steps, which establish the conceptual framework of the website. It offers two directions: the intellectual track and social awareness track; one focuses on the past, another the present. The intellectual track requires students to explore the historical background and life experiences of many remarkable people, who have made significant contributions in history. The social awareness track encourages students to become social observers and contemplate ethical issues in our society. Both directions are well implemented in the courses’ syllabi, one for each course.