Creative Considerations (Asynchronous Session)
Creative and Collaborative Quarantining: The Impacts and Implications of Online Reality in Architectural Pedagogy During a Global Pandemic View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Vincent Hui, Alvin Huang, Tatiana Estrina
Over the past decade online reality (VR) has emerged as a highly immersive medium for creative and technical disciplines despite its widespread adoption as an entertainment platform. Various factors, ranging from rapidly advances in computational power for ever diminishing formfactors and price points through to increased integration into daily life (such as social media, video content, and video games), have made VR more accessible to a larger audience daily. Though VR was once a novelty and emergent tool in architectural pedagogy, its value as a robust tool in design education has only been accelerated by the conditions stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. Whereas many academic institutions and programs were able to rapidly transition to operating remotely, architectural educators faced an unprecedented challenge – how to teach a discipline so entrenched in collaboration, discourse, and creation of the built environment without one of their own? This condition gave rise to an opportunity for widespread integration of VR into the architecture curriculum. This paper presents a survey of various VR tools currently available for architectural educators, their core benefits, and challenges. Through examples of student work, the paper articulates best practices and opportunities for VR integration within the design studio curriculum. Conventional studio teaching remains a unique component of an architectural education which cannot be completely replicated with VR tools; however the authors posit several key benefits for the integration of online digital media into the studio context including greater design engagement, enhanced feedback, heightened phenomenological sensitivity, and technical resolution.
Viral Digital Skills Development for Interdisciplinary Competence of Foreign Languages Students View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rusudan Makhachashvili, Ivan Semenist
The COVID-19 pandemic induced amplified digitalization measures in the higher education sphere, informed by the need to take quick comprehensive action in order to achieve the overarching result to transform educational scenarios into interdisciplinary digital, remote, and hybrid frameworks. The consequent functional tasks to meet this challenge are estimated as 1) to activate comprehensive complex skillsets, otherwise latent or underutilized in the educational process; 2) to boost ICT competence and digital literacy of all participants of the educational process, relocated to the computer realm. The study objective is to diagnose and critically review the empirical case of digital skills viral development and application to construe interdisciplinary competencies of students of European and Asian Languages major programs in Ukraine, employed in the year 2020 due to quarantine measures. The study premise is the identification of various competency principles, derivative of twenty-first-century skills for university staff members, and projected digital literacy requirements. The survey method and diagnostic analysis of different digital literacy components, ICT tools, and digital skills implementation are used to assess the parameters of efficiency of transforming real-life linguistic education practices into the digital and hybrid format. The investigation seeks to identify the correlation between various groups of applied digital skills and soft skills, instrumental to develop interdisciplinary professional awareness of Liberal Arts students. The study allows detection of challenges for actual and underdeveloped skills (hard, technical, and soft), that participants of the educational process encountered through digital format adaptation in programs of European and Asian Languages.
Mentoring During a Pandemic: Perspectives and Possibilities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tina Selvaggi, Rose Jagielo Manion
This study describes a semester long project (mid-August through early December 2020) involving twenty-two practicing teachers and eleven first-year teachers. The practicing teachers were enrolled in a graduate course at a large comprehensive public university. This course studied leadership as it relates to a Reading Specialist certification and they were tasked with mentoring a first-year teacher. The first-year teachers were recent graduates of the same university whose student teaching had been greatly impacted by school closures during the pandemic. As student teachers during spring 2020, they had a traditional experience from January through mid-March but were then thrust into the world of remote and hybrid learning from March until the conclusion of the semester in May. The graduate students coached and mentored the first-year teachers during their first semester of teaching. This coaching primarily focused on the areas of classroom management, meeting the needs of all learners, and integration of technology. Perspectives from both the mentors and mentees are shared. Possibilities for future mentoring models are also discussed.
Teaching ESL Students Core Subjects at a Distance: Teacher Challenges in China View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gregory MacKinnon
The Covid-19 virus prompted a considerable population of teachers to leave China in the Spring of 2020. After traveling back to home countries, many were charged with continuing instruction of Chinese school children from a distance. This research reports on a mixed-methods approach to investigating the inherent challenges accompanying drastic changes in pedagogy experienced by a convenience sample of teachers.
Online Courses and Agile Experiences of Remote Software Development Teams View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christine Bakke
Agile software development is foundational for modern software engineering; however, as agile has been developed for business applications, clear practices for implementing agile into university education is lacking. Business feedback provided the impetus for creating agile-like educational experiences in order to better prepare students for industry. The objective of this work is to present a case study of how agile practices were selectively modified and embedded into three online courses, allowing students to develop software while engaging in agile methods as remote teams. During a single semester, teams were exposed to a variety of agile practices including: iterative development, Kanban, three questions, up front design, collaborative design, Scrum, stand-ups, soft skill development and customer/manager feedback. Through incorporation of agile practices, remote teams work collaboratively to develop industry-like software projects. A comparative analysis of student feedback, via identical survey instruments, reports perceived value of the course as an educational experience, agile practices, team collaboration, managerial tools, and soft skills.
