Effectiveness of Online Architectural Design Teaching

Abstract

Design teaching is an important process and the core of Architectural education. It reflects the theoretical knowledge as well as practical knowledge while enhancing the sensitivities and lateral thinking of the students. This pedagogy facilitates exploring, experiencing, creating and team work based on cognitive, technical and social skills. Architectural design teaching traditionally relies on the face-to-face classroom educational system. As Covid -19 pandemic has impacted every field of society including education, most of the educational institutions, universities and schools throughout the world have switched to online systems. Accordingly, architectural education also had to adapt to online systems to some extent even without having teaching methods specifically designed for online architectural education. This research was conducted to find out the effectiveness of online architectural design teaching in the Sri Lankan context according to the perception of students and teachers. Qualitative data were collected using a researcher made structured questionnaire distributed among teachers and students attached to Sri Lankan architecture schools. The questionnaire was made based on five design teaching and learning methods, i.e. group discussions, tutoring, critiques, field visits and group work. The purposive sampling method was used to select the sample considering the experience in both face-to-face and online architectural design teaching. The size of the sample was 175 including both students and teachers. The data were analysed by using the software OriginLab in order to assess the participants’ perceptions. The overall results show that more than twice as many respondents perceive online teaching to be ineffective in comparison to those that are in agreement with its effectiveness