Abstract:

The continuous grow year-over-year in enrolment rate of students in Egyptian universities is causing serious problems to the higher education system in general and affects the educational process.

The current facilities in universities did not increase or expand significantly over the last 30 years to meet the increased demand of students which directly put serious pressure on these facilities that serve an increased number of students that got admitted in higher education over years.

This paper explores and analyze the impact of higher enrolment rates on the overall quality of education and experience of the educational process and its intended learning outcomes specially for technical and practical curriculums. The effect shall be discussed through the paper on "working drawings" technical curriculum on the bachelor year of architecture, faculty of fine arts, Helwan university, Egypt.

That increase has a wider range of impact not only affects existing facilities and how it handles the increased capacities but also on the assigned staff and how they can deal with the increased effort required to monitor, review, and keep up with every student as in traditional learning methods that once was designed for less than half of current capacities.

As a result of current situation, an urgent need emerged to change the traditional learning methods and becomes essential to handle the new normal which involves high density classes that exceeds by far the optimum class capacity and its facilities. This reality requires more flexible, optimized and out-of-the-box solutions to achieve intended learning outcomes specially in practical curriculums that require long studio hours, theoretical lectures and 1-1 discussions and feedback on assigned tasks.

The current research shall propose a framework with a set of modern educational approaches to deliver an optimized educational experience in practical curriculums especially for high density classes as well as tight educational facilities available and limited assigned staff to support the educational process for such technical and practical courses.

To address the aforementioned objectives, this study will thoroughly investigate the lack of response from existing educational facilities and infrastructure to expand and develop to accommodate the increased number of students year over year which leads to deliver poor educational experience and falling short to handle the needs of high-density classes particularly in practical and technical college departments such as architectural technical curriculums.

The research work in this study is organized into three main research tasks that are intended to accomplish research objectives Contextualization, Empirical Approach and Synthesis.

Even with the tremendous development in remote learning which emerged in response to the pandemic, technical courses with practical hours remain in an urgent need to accommodate flexible yet effective methods to provide better learning experiences for bachelor students in both practical and theoretical terms.

The new approach provides key qualities to the education process starting with better handling by instructors, linking theoretical information with practice, reducing paper waste, and reducing delays in returning feedback for students on their work as well as greater student satisfaction towards the course.

Keywords:

Architectural Education, Architecture Curriculum, Technical Course, Intended Learning Outcomes