Education

OTP (Online Teaching Platform)

Collaborative studying across continents

Online teaching platform home screen

Funded: Studienreformwerkstatt, BMBF

Teaching in an interdisciplinary and international context is challenging. First, due to the different levels of expertise in the various disciplines. Second, the physical distance and time lags limit direct contact between teachers and students. Here, online teaching formats offer great potential by allowing (1) the easy sharing and combining of lectures, tutorials, and exercises by different teachers and (2) students to learn independent of space and time, and individually customize their studying to their own needs.

Therefore, we created an online teaching platform (OTP) for video-based teaching of innovative methods for architectural and urban planning. Individual topics are taught in teaching modules (e.g. urban analysis, simulation and modeling, virtual reality visualization, water infrastructure). These modules consist of video lectures, tutorials, interviews, learning objectives, and exercises and can be combined with different courses.

The platform is envisaged to be open - allowing academics and practitioners worldwide to participate. To date, several international experts have produced content for this platform (for example Theresa Fink, Ondrej Vesely, Jacob Wegener AIT Vienna; David Neudecker, FCL Singapore or Wossen Woldekidan & Aziza Abdulfetah, EiABC Addis Ababa). The production of the videos is supported by the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar’s eLab.

Over the last year, the OTP has been tested in several seminars in different courses. A flipped classroom concept was pursued (mediation of contents online, assistance in solving the exercises offline). This concept was rated as very positive by the students during the teaching evaluation. The OTP is currently supported by the university in the context of a study reform project. Here, further content is to be created and didactic concepts for online learning are being tested. In the future, we will run international courses with our partner universities in Addis Abeba (EiABC), New York (Pratt Institute), Austria (AIT), Singapore (FCL), and Shanghai (Tongji University).

 

online teaching platform title screen
collection of video presentations created by students
teaching module “urban density” by sven schneider (bauhaus-universität weimar)
teaching module “spatial data exploration” by david neudecker (fcl singapore)