A Focus on Pedagogy

Abstract

Edx, LinkedinLearning, and Google Career Certificates are a few names that continuously surface in today’s online learning environment. Simultaneously supporting and challenging formal higher education, these new educational tools reflect a shifting demand in emerging students – to learn a desired lesson at a desired time and location. This renewed sense of agency has allowed students to choose what they want to learn while opting for flexible ways of learning at the same time.
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has propelled many to shift to teaching online in the most accessible ways. While many forms of online learning may seek to replicate familiar methods of teaching from onsite, current digital tools and platforms warrant educators to employ innovative ways to teach online. Using a combination of digital tools requires the user to understand the tool’s own strength and to keep an open mind in order to redirect its purpose towards a classroom setting. This abstract for the lightning talk seeks to share readily existing digital tools and media such as Instagram and Discord that are unfamiliar to the architectural classroom but hold immense potential to support teaching in novel ways that support the arising desire for flexibility and agency in learning. Also, the talk will share examples of how new tools like VR can help cultivate a sense of studio culture in the digital realm. With many of these methods tested out at an intermediate studio setting at the Boston Architectural College in the recent semesters before and during the pandemic, I hope to participate in the effort to further advance architectural education by sharing examples of how some of these tools were used in classrooms. Also, these examples hope to be shared with the aim of opening up discussion of larger questions related to education such as collegiate community, diversity and equity, and educational access.