Due to Covid19, all teaching on our comics courses has been moved online, including workshops and exercises on drawing, image composition, and development of visual narratives. As the focus is on sketching and sequence composition processes, as critique and reflection is closely connected to work-in-progress, the move to distance teaching has removed the partners in these processes and conversations from one another. With tight budgets, no dedicated software-licences are bought, but the idea is to use what we have and add as little necessary freeware as needed / possible. 

While lecturing on and introducing to theoretical backgrounds, techniques, and examples on distance has continued to work quite well, the need to optimise student learning on online design assignments and workshops has been a challenge. It was understood before we had to move all teaching online that developing drawing skills as well as advancing the understanding of pictorial sequential narratives depends on continuous feedback between teachers and students as well as peer-learning between the students. But in practice, this has been the biggest challenge. 

We have been forced to develop alternative strategies and methods for teaching visual composition processes, showcasing as well as exercising comics-production processes. Didactic strategies have been developed to overcome the restrictions caused by online low-resolution visuals, the inability to unobtrusively observe and participate in design processes, to involve all students actively in critique-sessions, etc. In due consequence, we are putting together a kind of tool-box for teaching and workshopping on visual gestaltung online. 

We would like to present the results and invite the participants of this workshop to play through and discuss them to help us understand what is needed to make them work for other teachers on other courses that teach visualising / drawing / visual narratives.