In the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering,\u00a0Dr\u00a0Robert Grover\u00a0co-teaches\u00a0a design project with\u00a0Dr\u00a0Victoria Stephenson,\u00a0to a combination of four different cohorts, across the two disciplines of architecture and civil engineering.\u00a0 The project is delivered\u00a0in Year 3 of undergraduate\u00a0degree\u00a0programmes. This case study highlights the experience of delivering this\u00a0during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, where the majority of learning and teaching was carried out\u00a0remotely, and online.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0five-week\u00a0project tasked students with designing the refurbishment of a power station in Manhattan, into a cultural centre. Previously the brief would have\u00a0included\u00a0a site visit but as the students would be unable to carry out visits, due to government restrictions, Manhattan was chosen\u00a0to provide\u00a0students\u00a0with the opportunity to\u00a0be ambitious in their plans.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0following characteristics\u00a0describe the four\u00a0participating\u00a0cohorts:<\/p>\n
The students were allocated to groups of 6 or 7,\u00a0with\u00a0each group\u00a0consisting of\u00a0a mixture of architecture and civil engineering students.\u00a0 The\u00a0group\u00a0allocation involved a mixture of manual and automated process, to enable each group to have students from a mix of disciplines.<\/p>\n
In preparation for working in groups, students were able to:<\/p>\n
Whilst working on the project students\u00a0were allowed to choose how they\u00a0worked collaboratively,\u00a0in a number of ways:<\/p>\n
The project included two review points (interim and final) for formative feedback to\u00a0be\u00a0provided, before a final project submission was made for summative\u00a0grading.<\/p>\n
The overall reflection is that the project worked successfully.\u00a0\u00a0During the five-week\u00a0process\u00a0there were no reports from students being unable to work in their team.\u00a0 However, there were comments\u00a0from students\u00a0about group work being challenging, although this is frequently recorded feedback from any group project.<\/p>\n
Some benefits of online\/remote working were identified:<\/p>\n
There were also some drawbacks that would need adapting for future iterations of the project:<\/p>\n
There were aspects of the exercise that would be beneficial to incorporate into any future campus-based run of this project.<\/p>\n
The students benefited from clearly stated instructions and weekly deadlines. These were a requirement of having to support students remotely, but the clear benefits to the groups, in terms of supporting their organisational skills, illustrate that this approach should continue.\u00a0 It\u2019s especially helpful when bringing groups with varying experience together.\u00a0Scaffolding content and activity were much more important than previously recognised.<\/p>\n
It was\u00a0still\u00a0clear that\u00a0some of\u00a0the more enjoyable aspects\u00a0of peer interaction were missed by students,\u00a0and it\u2019s not obvious how these aspects could be replicated online:<\/p>\n