Abstract:

In architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning education and practice, computer, information, internet and World Wide Web (WWW) are challenged to combine these technologies into design education as a scaffolding and intervention mechanism. This work presents a web-scaffolding education model, teaching/learning strategy, to assist undergraduate and graduate design students’ sustainable spatial planning in a dispersed environment. Particularly, this model is for selecting a suitable housing site. The objective of this research is to examine the measurement and verification of the model, which would assist students to have more broad understandings of sustainable spatial planning in a collaborative teaching/learning context while having communication with professors and/or experts. Two variables, multi-criteria selection and survey questionnaire, are measured and verified in two design studios as focus groups to reflect on how using it affects students’ sustainable spatial planning process and their learning activities. Afterwards, objective comparison is done with two control groups to identify the direct effect of the model, promoting students’ learning activities, enhancing knowledge acquisition and satisfying a mix of students with different necessities. Precisely, in the survey results it is apparent that the model proposed is beneficial to students not only from preliminary and initial site analysis but also to further planning and final housing design. In the results of objective comparison, the focus group chooses 90% suitable areas while the control group chooses only 20% suitable areas. In conclusions, the research presents solid results of content analysis, survey questions and objective comparison to introduce new possible sustainable spatial planning, starting with site selection, other than what are now employed in design education. Therefore, this research embodies to examine new web-scaffolding education model potentials and continues further to open new education research venues.

Keywords:

Web-scaffolding model, asynchronous design education, sustainability, Scaffolding and intervention mechanism, spatial planning.