After the American River College campus shut down in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the fashion department struggled with its online transition because the majority of its activities and classes required that students meet face to face.

According to Dyanne Marte, the department chair of the fashion department, the transition to online learning had been hard for the department.

“It’s difficult to give comments and feedback through a screen because we are used to looking at the garments in person, but we are doing the best we can,” Marte said.

Marte says that each professor has his or her teaching method, but she found that it is more useful when she pre-records her classes.

For the student’s assignments, according to Marte, the professors are either asking the students to send a photo of their project ahead of time or if the class is live on Zoom, they ask the students to show their project to the camera so that they can capture a photo of the assignment.

“I like to get images ahead of time, and I can annotate the photos and give comments and send back those photos with our comments and drawings,” Marte said.

Marte also says that since the students can’t be on campus and work face-to-face and don’t have access to the material or the equipment, the department sent a list of the material to them to work remotely.

“We have a kit that we sent out to students, including needles, some of the supplies, and the fabric material,” Marte said. “We have a list of material that they need for each class, and we try to minimize the cost for the students and only require the materials that they will need for each class.”

According to Marte, the fashion show was supposed to happen this fall semester. Due to the pandemic setbacks, the department decided to postpone the event and focus more on branding and social media marketing.

“Instead of having a traditional fashion show, we want to focus more on branding and social media presence,” Marte said. “We want the students to come up with their fashion show segment, and once we can be back on campus, we want to show the fruitage of the past years to them.”

Carlos Garcia, an ARC fashion major, says it has been an adjustment transitioning to online learning.

“It’s been very different remote learning especially with the fashion department area; I’m a very hands-on learning type of student,” Garcia said.

Garcia says it has been challenging to adapt to the remote learning scenario as a fashion design major since he is the hands-on learning type.

“As a hands-on learning student myself, if I were a student taking, for example, a pattern class, I would not be succeeding if I didn’t attend a face to face class before,” Garcia said.

According to Garcia, professors have been very supportive during these online remote classes.

“The professor’s support has been amazing from the fashion department, especially Dyanne; she has been very patient, and she was very understanding with the situations,” Gacia said. “It was difficult for me to be motivated to do a collection and also stay on track.”