Community of practice in game art and design education with Discord application

Arts education in the 2020s has seen a drastic change in the modes of instructional delivery and learning as a consequence of global pandemic, which put into practice various kinds of online learning tools and approaches on a large scale. With different video conferencing and social communication platforms not originally designed for educational use being applied in the teaching and learning contexts, discourses on their educational affordance have been unfolded for best practices in the realm of arts education. This chapter presents the adoption of Discord application, an instant messaging social platform originally built for gamers, as a single-platform solution for teaching and learning activities in game art and design programmes at higher education levels. It illustrates the system design that facilitates remote learning, virtual classroom structure, dynamics and social interactions among students and teachers, and the educational affordances beyond general communication. The blurred borderline and proper balance between formal and informal learning have also been discussed, which help build a more democratic community of learning among teachers and students as suggested by Dewey (1916). It helps resemble the flow of the physical schooling experience implemented in the virial space where learning is unbounded and immersed in social presence, where students enjoyed a new nuance in arts learning and be prepared for any further transformative changes in arts education. Suggestions on how this approach could be applied in the teaching and learning of other arts disciplines are provided.