Evaluating distance education performance within the scope of architectural education

Abstract

Turkey is affected by the COVID-19 pandemic widely as well as all around the world. There is also a global impact in the field of education. Several precautions were taken for preventing infection from COVID-19 at a minimal level. One of the taken precautions is launching a distance education system (DES). DES started to practice from primary to higher education easily and swiftly. This system is an alternative to the existing education system. However, universities’ architecture departments that have theoretical courses besides applied courses, are known that they are hard to put to set, moreover, most of them hesitate to start distance education due to characteristics of architectural education. Architectural education teaches codifying phenomenon, concepts, thoughts visually with the help of symbols and teach to analyse these codes. This tenet involves different processes from a student’s former education life. Therefore, to reach the aims of architectural education features’ and actualization level of learning is essential. Professional schools give privileged status to systemic, preferably scientific knowledge, and the schools’ prevailing epistemology of practice, treats professional competence as the application ok privileged knowledge to instrumental problems of practice. When architectural education is considered as a process to gain essential skills, it can be seen that how active learning is important. It does not seem possible to perform “active learning” requirements with the distance education system’s existing opportunities and architecture students will perform “passive learning” during DES is thought. This study focuses on how DES is made productive for architectural education which started to use due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The main aim of this research is to determine problems of architecture students and instructors related to distance architecture education and offering solutions. Additionally, this research goals to contribute to the limited distance architecture education system. To reach these aims questionnaire forms were constituted toward interviews with both architecture students and instructors and from the literature review. Questionnaires were prepared separately for students and lecturers. This procedure aims to offer an integrated solution by gathering different perspectives of participants. Data of the project were acquired by applying online questionnaires to participants via e-mail. Obtained data were analysed statistically using SPSS 22.0 software. This research will make a remarkable contribution about how active learning at applied courses can be increased during DES at architectural schools by presenting qualitative and quantitative findings.