昂贵、辛苦的建筑教育能够通过在线教学改变现状？
Architecture Education is Unhealthy, Expensive, and Ineffective. Could Online Learning Change That?

由专筑网李韧，韩平编译

本文最初发表于Common Edge，原标题为“在线教学是否是建筑学未来的教育形式？”

当前社会的高等教育正处在重大转折点。专业教育对于每位建筑师来说都是必须经历的，然后在不远的将来，建筑学教学也许会使用网络授课的形式。这意味着未来的设计工作室也可能是以网络的形式存在着。这种形式上的转变也许能够解决当今建筑教育所面临的一些问题，但就这种方式自身来说也有一些潜在的问题需要解决。因此，我们可以通过设计新型教学方法、提升数字化学习能力等方式来促进学生之间社会关系的建立。

一些人认为这种在线教育形式适用于美国，例如波士顿建筑学院、伊利诺工学院、劳伦斯理工大学等高等院校。在教学过程中，学生可分为不同的在线小组，其规模与现场教学类似，这些在线小组仍然每周有固定的时间进行课程学习，同时需要提交作业和进行讨论。学习课程以视频的形式为主，课后则每个学生独立完成绘图作业然后上传文档，然后老师会通过书面或者视频的方式对每份作业进行点评，学生也能够通过自己组员之间的交流来获取不同的信息与想法。

在这些项目中，他们常常会被注明为“low residency”，而不是通常运用的“在线”，这是因为学生通常每个学期都需要在学校里呆上一周，学习传统的课程。虽然这也表现了当代教育形式仍然对线下教室具有一定的依赖性，但同时结合网上教学，也能够适当地平衡二者之间的关系。

当前的在线课堂主要集中于Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)领域，这还是一种新型形式，并且这种形式只能在获得国家认证的平台上进行（当前法国已采用这种形式）。MOOCs主要面向如哈佛大学设计学院研究生和东京大学所运用的EdX这样的建筑教育平台。这些平台以授课为主，有时也仿照工作室的形式。例如TU Delft的“公众的城市设计：荷兰城市”，它可以通过Pinterest来处理学生上传的项目，同时教授也能够每周通过视频的形式为学生们点评作业。

考虑到不断增长的教育费用，以及科技产业对于现代生活的影响，这很可能是引起“low-residency”学位和MOOCs的结合原因，这种形式也将很快引起教学方式的更新换代。另外，建筑学院当前的工作室以学生的设计作品为基础，这种模式基于学生的面对面交流。但是在未来的在线教育过程中，这样的传统交流方式可能会减少，这也不全是坏事。

当前的教育过程强调学生的独立自主性，在特定的团队或工作室中完成小组作业。这种教学方式让学生之间的相互交流多过学生与老师之间的沟通，从而让学生更加独立地完成自己的设计任务。这也意味着学生们常常深夜还在工作室加班加点，甚至对老师并未提及的专业领域展开辩论，这导致了学生们过分关注一些与课程无关的问题。

因此，如果学生自己在家工作学习时这种状况便不复存在。这便是从实体教育过渡到在线教育的一大契机，这能够更好地将书本上的知识和实际工程结合在一起。

然而，在线教育也有一些弊端，例如，学生们就无法直观地了解到其他人的想法与工作流程。这将会导致一个后果，那便是除了最终完整成型的方案结果，学生们则需要自己全面自助地去学习其中的相关知识。为了避免这种情况的方式，我们需要共同了解一下在线教育的各种优势。

事实上，在线教育的本质是教学方法和工作方式的结合，而不是为了取代现有的教学模式。人们通过各种设备以及互联网能够进行更加直观的追踪与交流，这些是传统教育无法做到的。在建筑教育中，在线教育意味着未来的进步趋势，如同学生之间可以通过自动文本编辑和语音识别功能保持充分的联系，同时老师也可以以这种方式检查学生们的设计任务。在当今社会，侵犯隐私是一个随处可见的说法，但对于这样一个高效的教育体系来说，这便是一种无力的偏见，因为在这样的背景下，任何对建筑有兴趣的人士都有机会以较低的成本进行建筑专业的学习。

在这个民主的社会，教育形式改革的另一个作用是将学生的独立课程转变为合作课程，这样有助于改善在线教育缺乏面对面沟通的一大缺陷。当前，程序员们编制了多种多样的在线合作工具，例如Dropbox的Paer和谷歌的Sheets、Docs 以及Slides。工作室的特性是将建筑教育和数字创作相结合，而这种结合则能够指引着教育方式的改革方向，从而达到预期的创新目标。在许多人的心目中，建筑师仿佛都是一位位天资聪慧的圣人，因此这样的教育形式的改革也有助于打破坊间的各种传言，因为每个杰出的建筑项目都离不开整个团队的共同努力。

对于此我们也许应当采取这样的态度，从传统教学到在线教学的转变主要受建筑课程所影响。就此来说，当今的工作室也可能以在线的形式而进行，如果充分地考虑互联网的发展历史，那么便可了解到，任何形式一旦形成固定模式，那改变起来就具有一定的难度。这也是当前我们需要以一种更具颠覆性的方式来重塑未来建筑教育模式的原因。

建筑教育者应当主动推进这些改革，而不是被动地改变。

This article was originally published by Common Edge as "Is Online Learning Really the Future of Architectural Education?"
Higher education is on the cusp of a major transition. It’s extremely likely that professional training, including that necessary to become an architect, will be conducted primarily online in the relatively near future. This means that design studio classes, a hallmark of the architect’s experience, will also happen online, likely without the in-person, face-to-face contact that defines that experience. The shift will eliminate many self-defeating aspects of today’s studio culture, but there’s also potential pitfalls that need to be addressed, before an online version of that culture acquires its own bad habits. We can do this by pro-actively devising new teaching and working methods that leverage the capabilities of digital education to promote constructive social dynamics between students.
For a good sense of how architecture education can occur online, consider the handful of NAAB-accredited online architecture degrees currently available in the US: Boston Architectural College, Southern Illinois University, and Lawrence Technical University, to name a few. In these programs, students are divided into online groups, similar in size as campus-based studios, and are prompted to interact with each other and their professors in weekly cycles of lessons, assignments and discussion. Lessons are largely video-based, but assignments utilize multi-media uploads of drawings and models students produce offline to conduct an online version of a traditional pin-up. Feedback is given by professors through written comments or online chat, and students are often sorted into small groups to give feedback to each other.
The aspect of these programs that frequently earns them the label “low residency,” as opposed to “online,” is that students are typically required to gather on campus once a semester for an intense week of traditional, in-person studio classes. While this reveals a lingering dependence on a physical classroom, these program’s resourceful use of the internet to translate teaching that’s otherwise heavily dependent on place is impressive.
Now consider the strides being made in the field of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), still fledgling as a format, though expected to replace low-residency distance education when online-only degree programs begin to be recognized by national accreditation bodies (this has already happened in France). MOOCs focused on architectural education are flourishing on platforms like EdX, which hosts noteworthy institutions, such as Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and the University of Tokyo. Most of these classes are lecture-based but some emulate a studio format. TU Delft’s “Urban Design for the Public Good: Dutch Urbanism,” for example, handles unusually large numbers of student project uploads with group Pinterest boards, and professors offer weekly video feedback to the whole class on select submissions.
Given the ever-increasing costs of higher education, as well as the tech industry’s penchant for “disrupting” traditional aspects of daily life, it’s likely that low-residency degrees and MOOCs are the first iterations of an online education format that will soon eclipse campus-based learning, including architectural studies. What’s worth noting is that almost every aspect of architecture school’s current studio culture, which silently drives the work students produce, is entirely dependent on face-to-face contact between classmates. At a cursory glance, this culture stands to be erased—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Presently, architecture education emphasizes independent student projects, produced in small groups set in specific classrooms—the studio format. Because this format ensures students spend far more time alone with each other than with their instructors, it often breeds a preference among students to put forth self-justified design solutions drawing on little to none of the institutional knowledge being imparted to them in lecture classes. This means late nights spent working alongside each other in studio, beyond the reach of a professor’s guiding hand, drives intense competition between students over things they know little to nothing about yet. This unchecked one-upmanship often leads to undue focus on matters completely unrelated to lessons the professors in the curriculum are attempting to teach in concert.
In an online-only degree program, where students produce work at home, by themselves, this condition doesn’t exist. Thus, a transition to online education in architecture is a realistic opportunity to discard the aspects of today’s studio culture that promote a disconnect between architectural knowledge and its implementation.
The benefits of physically separated architectural education, however, also come with a major drawback: it lacks direct exposure to the thoughts, values and working processes of other people. This could lead to a future where all but the best programs are conducted in a cost-effective, online manner, while pupils who can afford face-to-face education pay full price for a premium, in-person experience. To avoid such a schism among future architects, we need to look to the methods of online education for advantages that in-person teaching can’t match.
The essence of this opportunity is to view new technologies as a means for devising new teaching and working methods, rather than substituting existing ones. Because everything transmitted through a device or over the internet can be traced, tracked and recorded in a way face-to-face interactions cannot, digital education offers many advantages that have yet to be fully realized. In architectural education, this means future advances in areas such as automated text and voice recognition could be harnessed across a massive swath of students to keep activities like professor feedback and small-group peer review aligned with a curriculum’s goals. Overtones of privacy invasion are obvious in such a notion today, but that bias might pale in the face of an education system so efficient that nearly anyone interested in becoming an architect (or anything else, for that matter) can pursue their goal without the small fortune or massive debt currently required.
Further along the lines of democratization, another strategy for improvement could be to use this transition as an opportunity to change the primary delivery method of students’ work from independent projects to group projects. This might help mitigate a lack of face-to-face contact in an online platform, though it may also contain a much larger opportunity. Online group working tools, such as Dropbox’s Paper and Google’s Sheets, Docs and Slides, are an area of the tech sector currently seeing massive amounts of development. The particularly intense nature of studio work means architecture education’s embrace of collaborative digital creation could direct the evolution of such tools to realize some truly innovative capabilities. Such a move is also in line with reforming the social culture of design schools by halting perpetuation of the myth that architects should strive to be singular geniuses rather than part of a multi-talented team.
Perhaps the most important attitude we can adopt is that the transition from in-person to online education is bound by forces larger than an architecture curriculum. In this light, it seems likely that today’s studio culture will simply transition into an online version of itself which, if the recent history of the internet is considered, might be difficult to change once it’s defined. This is why right now is the time to shape the social dynamics of tomorrow’s architecture schools in a way that could make the whole profession stronger.
Architectural educators should take it upon themselves to drive this change, lest it drive them instead.


出处：本文译自www.archdaily.com/，转载请注明出处。