RICERCA ITALIANA     

Research and experimental evaluation of e-learning new model and tecnologies in architecture education

Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza"

Abstract

The research intends to develop new interactive and multidisciplinary applications for e-learning in architecture, to test and evaluate the quality of online courses and to define, therefore, the guidelines for an e-learning methodology in Architecture.
The strategic goals of the research program are:
a. development of asynchronous interactive lessons able to focus on the multidisciplinarity of Architecture and the integration of design disciplines;
b. identification and development of synchronous applications to be tested in virtual laboratories;
c. construction of online thematic databases to support teaching;
d. identification of the platform for the diffusion of the architectural courses with special attention to catchment area and to the system expansibility;
e. definition and didactic experimentation of the Design Virtual Laboratories on the telecontiguity system “Augmented desk”;
f. definition and experimentation of simulation models for design process in urban and regional design;
g. test and evaluation of the e-learning courses produced by the operative units;
h. realisation of a logistic structure for observation and monitoring of teaching effectiveness;
i. certification of quality for online education.

The program is articulated in 2 years but it can be described in detail in four operative periods.

First operative period
- Construction of interactive design courses supported by online thematic databases and contextual definition of guidelines for an e-learning methodology in Architecture;
- definition of a knowledge representation structure and of a case base of architectural objects and design alternatives;
- Simulation for e-learning in urban and regional design;
- Determination of the technological components to realise the prototype Augmented desk.

Second operative period
- identification of the platform for the diffusion of the architectural courses with special attention to catchment area and to the system expansibility;
- construction of interactive lessons with the aim of defining a course which could guide other professors in implementing other e-learning courses;
- development of the telecontiguity synchronous system for the virtual laboratories of design;
- prototyping of the Augmented Desk - first internal tests.

Third operative period
- Test of the e-learning courses and participation to the interactive design workshops in telecontiguity;
- Equipment of the operative units of Torino, Chieti-Pescara, Ancona and Roma with analogous telecontiguity terminals for the testing during synchronous events through the GARR net.
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Fourth operative period
- Evaluation on the effectiveness of e-learning by the means of tests on quality and quantity and testing on the acquired strategies and design abilities;
- Validation and publication of the results;
- testing of Augmented desk in the experimentation workshops.
Some of the operative units will be assisted in their work by specialised laboratories: the Multimedia Laboratory of Architecture LaMA in Rome, the High Quality Laboratory - Territorial Integrated Design - LAQ-TIP – in Torino, the Laboratory of the Consorzio Interuniversitario per i Servizi Innovativi in Rete in Molise, the Laboratorio di Progettazione Assistita ed Intelligenza Artificiale (LIAPA) in Ancona.
The network of the five operative units intends to test the platforms and the technological tools for e-learning in Architecture.
The operative units will develop experimental courses in the various fields of architecture to be published on the server for the monitoring of educational quality. <<<

Principal Investigator

Lucio Barbera Università degli Studi di ROMA "La Sapienza"

Research Objectives

The main aim of the research is to propose and experiment a didactic methodology for e-learning in Architecture.
The strategic goals of the research program are:

a. development of asynchronous interactive lessons able to focus on the multidisciplinarity of Architecture and the integration of design disciplines. The possibility to integrate various disciplines constitutes a fundamental quality/objective for e-learning to test and verify in the research. In the course the experience will be optimised in order to define the guidelines to set up e-learning lessons for architecture teaching, that will be published at the end of the research.

b. identification and development of synchronous applications to be tested in virtual laboratories; The collaborative learning events will be realised thanks to a virtual laboratory in which it’s possible to search and test new teaching procedures, through the telecontiguity system.

c. construction of online thematic databases to support teaching. The research Unit will set up an index-linked structure for the implementation of thematic databases online to support the courses, hosted on the server, accessible and updated by each unit, in order to give the students a collection of organised material.

d. identification of the platform for the diffusion of the architectural courses with special attention to catchment area and to the system expansibility. The architecture that will host the courses and the thematic databases, realised independently by each unit, will be on a server connected to storing units, in order to give easy access to the data of each Research Unit. The structure itself will have a number of remote access so that every user of the system can enter in transparent manner to the available courses on the server. The platform will contain a portal drawn in order to manage the whole project and will give access in transparent manner to all the courses and will permit to organize them according to the developed theme

e. definition and didactic experimentation of the Design Virtual Laboratories on the telecontiguity system “Augmented desk” and experimentation of simulation models for design process in urban and regional design. The research intends to test the platforms and the technological tools for e-learning in Architecture with particular attention to the Virtual Laboratories where the telecontiguity system will be set up.

f. test and evaluation of the e-learning courses produced by the operative units and realisation of a logistic structure for observation and monitoring of teaching effectiveness. All the e-learning courses prepared by the research units will be tested by a chosen number of students, equal to that of a traditional teaching course and submitted to a qualitative check of the teaching effectiveness. Quality parameters and indicators once defined, the Research Unit will arrange tools of qualitative and quantitative check for the evaluation of the e-learning courses. <<<

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

1. E-learning
Education is undergoing a rapid process of evolution, particularly in Higher Education where there is a concurrence between technological advancement due to e-learning and the need to modify traditional educational models.
For these reason many universities and teaching institutions are strongly pointing towards long-distance teaching environments, that train students who are not obliged to attend lessons, giving them maximum flexibility in time and learning mode, thanks to e-learning environments implemented in Internet.
At the same time it has been for a few years now that new technologies have been entering the learning field where new education methods are tested to verify the possible synergy between teaching innovations and the changes that these technologies have already brought to professional practice.
The Council of Europe (Lisbon 2000) has set a major aim for Europe to become before 2010 “the most dynamic and competitive knowledge society in the world, with sustainable economic growth, higher and better employment, and greater social cohesion”. In March 2001 the Council of Europe presented an e-learning action plan calling for a significant program of updating and coordination between European education systems. These include:
- developing and integrating ICT in education and training;
- developing high quality educational materials;
- creating flexible infrastructures to make e-learning accessible to all;
- promoting a universal digital instruction;
- creating lifelong learning opportunities.
In Italy the Stanca-Moratti Decree of 17 April, 2003 (GU n. 98 del 29-4-2003), sets the criteria and procedures for crediting long-distance courses held by state and non-state universities, and opens new teaching routes and opportunities to develop platforms and instruments capable to complete what already exists today on the e-learning market.

2. Education models
The design courses should respect precise formative requirements, in fact every architectural course has a specific training system: in this case education is a result of an individual process of learning supported by collaborative learning events.
The teaching method adopted prefers the self-training: it is based on interactive technologies, such as the Computer Based Training, the Intelligent Tutoring System and the Simulation.
The study and the development of Intelligent Tutoring System aims to improve the traditional educational techniques. In the architectural design domain, tutoring systems have usually autonomous reasoning abilities.
This research involves two well defined domains of the international research scenario: the Case Based Teaching (Schank 1991) and the Case Based Reasoning, that outlines the multimodal perceptual representation and the diagrammatic reasoning (Chandrasekaran 1999) by defining a view of "cognitive state" as an integrated and interlinked collection of "images" in various modalities: the perceptual ones and the conceptual ones. Thinking, problem solving, reasoning, etc. are best viewed as sequences of such states.

3. Virtual design laboratories
Collaborative learning events happen thanks also to virtual laboratory in which it's possible to search and test new teaching procedures, beyond the links of time and space.
Several disciplines already make extended educative use of the Virtual Laboratories for e-learning. The different disciplines conceive the simulations for pedagogical aims to teach how a process or a system actually performs. Internationally, there are some experimentations of simulation tools in the teaching of architectural design but in general, their purpose is the experimentation on the field -learning by doing- of the educative methodologies of design oriented to an extensive-increased cognitive process, to define, rather than solve, the problematic nodes of the design.
Different methodologies deals with the making of architecture. The one that we reference to is extensive, directed to understand the whole deal of the practice of the environmental construction, at various scales. This methodology aims to compose the separation between architectural and engineering design and planning (Cirbini 1984, Desportes 1997, Gabetti 1989). This approach re-establish a consolidated line between geography and history of the city and of the region, and the branch root of urban design and of European urban planning, in its various national variations (Choay 1965, Hall 1988). It outlines a specific attention to architecture promoting urban development with its irreducible conditions of uncertainty and its pluralism of actors and interests. This renewed awareness requires the development of techniques that support the action of design.

4. Telecontiguity System
Interaction design has become in the last years an interesting matter under discussion between platform and software designers in the e-learning field.
A specific ability is working out, and it interfere in the design of teaching and learning environments. The system that interacts with the user is an essential part of the process. It has to be designed in respect both of usability principles and practice experience.
The Telecontiguity System in the domain of synchronous long-distance collaboration, re-introduce in the e-learning field the relationship between teachers, between teachers and students, between Universities and external resources, that are usual and complex exchange events that could be lost in the e-learning system.
This system is conceptually rooted in the places where it is set up, building a kind of “collage-university”, that brings up-to-date both utopian intuitions of the ‘60 and post-modern theories of the ’70 (Archigram’s “Ideadotto Metropolitano” and Colin Rowe’s “Collage-city”)
Telecontiguity literally indicates the possibility to make perceptibly contiguous two distant spaces, as if they were separated only by a glass, and where the tele-transferred image is in real scale and comes from a fixed camera framing. The innovative idea is the reciprocity between the framing of the projected image and the framing of the shot, which is a real contact surface, that could reach the dimension of a room wall.
Telecontiguity is the integrated evolution of video-conference and video-surveillance, it inherits the audiovisual interactivity from the first and the fixed framing of space from the second. Particular care is given to the stage setting of the contiguous audiovisual surface that has to coincide with elements of the architectonic or urban space such as doors, windows, walls, fronts, etc. It’s an integration of the real space (Augmented Reality, see Flavia Sparacino MIT – USA) as the room doesn’t need to be darken.
Simulated and preconized by a hundred years of literature and science fiction, it is conceptually the accomplishment of predictions processed by humanists as Derrick de Kerchove, Paul Virilio and David Harvey, and it’s especially pursued in international researches in the last ten years on the Augmented Reality and the Teleimmersion.

5. Acquired experiences
A number of components of all the Research Units come from a significant European Project on e-learning: the University Polytechnic of Marche was the promoter and coordinator of the three year European project WINDS - Web Based INtelligent Tutoring System - On line Virtual University for Architecture and Engineering Design (25 European Universities and 2 industrial partners) that produced further results and tests in all the Universities.
The aim of WINDS project was to develop and experiment an innovative European wide system for teaching design. A number of strategic objectives guided the development of the project:
a) Breaking the national barriers of design education - integrate different cultural traditions and approaches to design teaching.
b) Towards a sustainable virtual university
c) Modelling “design thinking” and “design practice” - Design is one of the most demanding education domain and a domain deeply involved in practice. A good design teacher must be able to increase a wide set of know-how ranging from very specific domain competences to general purpose meta-cognitive skills. The models provide information to assist teacher in planning and design courses as well as theoretical foundations for the development of design adequate e-learning tools.
d) Bringing knowledge into practice - development of new methodologies for design education through the integration of knowledge representation technologies into the practice of design teaching and e-learning.
e) E-learning technologies for distance design teaching - learning management systems are now a mature technology nevertheless there is a lack of specific systems, supporting and enhancing thinking and practice in design. WINDS was concerned with the design and the implementation of advanced design oriented LMS, properly arranged to support design practice in the field of Architecture and Engineering.
The experimental courses are intended to be used European wide together with other courses of Composition, Technology and Management developed in other European universities in the context of the WINDS Project of the European Union. They are published on the web at the following address: http://www.e-arch.org.

6. Network of specialised Laboratories
The research on e-learning in based on an integrated net of specialised laboratories, with the task of experiment the technologies issued from the research and conveying their specific know how in the research.
In our case the operative base for the scientific net is formed by:
- The Multimedia Laboratory of Architecture LaMA of Rome, specialised in multimedia and interactive communication of architectural design, has set up for the WINDS Project an e-learning experimental design course and intends to move from this experience to the development of new interactive education procedures.
- The High Quality Laboratory - Territorial Integrated Design - LAQ-TIP – in Torino that has designed and manufactured a large interactive and immersive virtual reality structure. It effectively uses the simulation model for giving to a plurality of actors the use of what has been defined "the quantum time machine" for exploring next 20 or 30 years of the city or the region by the means of virtual reality and ICT. The research unit adds his know-how to the overall research project as a contribution to the development of systems for synchronous and remote collaboration for the education of the urban and regional design, starting from the augmented reality and teleimmersion tools, for the prototyping of the proposed Augmented Desk.
- The Laboratory of the Consorzio Interuniversitario per i Servizi Innovativi in Rete in Campobasso, where prof. Stefano Panunzi coordinates the experimental and educational researches that he carried out previously in the Rome University La Sapienza. These researches on Information Communication Technology applied to architecture and urban space, brought to the realisation of a working prototype of Telecontiguity System, presented in Campobasso on March, the 17th 2006, at the Molise University, on the occasion of the XVI week of Scientific and Technological Culture of the Ministry of Education, University and Research. This system is a goal achieved in Italy, unique example and absolutely innovative at an international level, for its efficacy, simplicity of use and low costs, compares to similar researches on Augmented Reality in Europe, United States and Canada.
- The Laboratorio di Progettazione Assistita ed Intelligenza Artificiale (LIAPA) of the University Polytechnic of Marche that carried out relevant research activities on Artificial Intelligence applied to cognitive processes in Architectural Design, under the supervision of Prof. Mario de Grassi. Moreover the LIAPA Laboratory realised and experimented the Architectural Symbolic Assistant (ASA) system, for the Progetto Finalizzato Edilizia (CNR 1991-95), which is an architectural design aiding system that uses Case Based Reasoning techniques.

7. E-learning experiments in the Italian Universities
The increasing economic investment in new information technologies doesn’t have a corresponding codification for the investments that university structures have to face to support traditional education in starting e-learning courses. New trends that are changing e-learning, specifically in design education, are now consolidated.
It will be of particular interest to develop and implement the potential on e-learning that already exists in the University of Chieti/Pescara, that recently brought to the status of Online University, especially with the comparison between the platform adopted and the one that the University of Rome will choose. <<<