Abstract:

The unexpected shift from onsite to online teaching caused by the pandemic outburst in 2020, has been a challenge for students and teachers alike in all parts of the world and in many educational fields. The specificity of architectural education brought forward a range of such challenges, some related to the teaching of practical disciplines, others, concerning the teaching of theoretical courses. Although the change of medium, from onsite to online, seems less problematic for courses than for projects, several difficulties emerged immediately, both for the audience and the presenter, in terms of giving up long-established habits. Based on a two year online experience within the Faculty of Architecture of Cluj-Napoca, this paper tries to evaluate different approaches in teaching architectural theory courses for students in the master program, taking into consideration several parameters. The study is three-folded. First, it examines the conditions in which students auditioned lectures, from the point of view of their physical environment. This further leads to establishing how and if optimal conditions for attending the course could or could not be established. Based on these observations, the paper further addresses the teaching methods that were used to maximize the attention spam of the audience, their involvement with the subjects discussed, and ultimately, their capacity to understand and form an opinion on the information received. The second part of the paper describes several teaching approaches involving technical tools, use of online presentation platforms but also evaluation methods, relations between the types of presentations and the subjects presented. It then tries to evaluate the success of each method in particular, as well as the relationship between methods as a whole. These evaluations are based on several indicators, such as the presence of the students, the frequency of their responses, the marks obtained at the final exam, as well as the institutional feedback of students regarding aspects of the didactic experience. Graphs and tables synthesize these data and lead to a `quantifiable` description of the academic process. The online context is seen as an opportunity to draw conclusions on teaching practices beyond the online experience itself. A third part of the paper thus compares the results of the two-year online experiment with the experience of onsite courses and tries to see how the latter can benefit from the former. Finally, the paper tries to anticipate the challenges of further applying lessons drawn from the recent online/onsite comparison and how there maybe institutional, psychological or organizational provocations in changing teaching practices for an improvement of education in the field of architectural theory.

Keywords:

Architectural theory, online, onsite.