Investigating Design Considerations for Supporting Remote Teaching and Learning of Physical Drawing

Teaching and learning physical drawing remotely pose user-experience challenges. In an online physical drawing course, instructors must interact with students through a camera for demonstrations, supervision, communication, and annotations in real-time. However, these activities are not well supported by commonly used video conferencing services. We conduct a qualitative study with seven instructors and five students to understand their practices and challenges in teaching and learning of physical drawing in a remote setting. Our study identifies four design considerations that a system supporting remote teaching and learning of physical drawing should take into account. We then demonstrate the technical feasibility of these design considerations by building a working prototype called SharedCanvas. We also validate our design considerations through a user study with SharedCanvas, revealing how they better supported interactions between instructors and students. We conclude by discussing our work in light of related studies on online drawing education and present future research opportunities to improve remote teaching of drawing.