The Virtual University : models and messages, lessons from case studies

The virtual university is an important example of the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to deliver higher education both in developed and developing countries. New initiatives are growing steadily as universities seek to address increasing demand and reach a broader, and in many cases, an international student body. Because of the different teaching and learning methods, virtual universities must develop policies and planning, management and financing procedures that are appropriate to their organization, resources and modes of operation. And because of their potential international reach, these institutions may operate outside the higher education policy environment at the national level, with significant policy implications related to accreditation, recognition and quality assurance

By hand and by computer – a video-ethnographic study of engineering students’ representational practices in a design project

In engineering education there has been a growing interest that the curriculum should include collaborative design projects. However, students’ collaborative learning processes in design projects have, with a few exceptions, not been studied in earlier research. Most previous studies have been performed in artificial settings with individual students using verbal protocol analysis or through interviews.  The context of this study is a design project in the fifth semester of the PBL-based Architecture and Design programme at Aalborg University. The students had the task to design a real office building in collaborative groups of 5–6 students. The preparation for an upcoming status seminar was video recorded in situ. Video ethnography, conversation analysis and embodied interaction analysis were used to explore what interactional work the student teams did and what kind of resources they used to collaborate and complete the design task. Complete six hours sessions of five groups were recorded using multiple video cameras (2 – 5 cameras per group). The different collaborative groups did not only produce and reach an agreement on a design proposal during the session – in their design practice they used, and produced, a wealth of tools and bodily-material resources for representational and modelling purposes. As an integral and seamless part of students’ interactional and representational work and the group’s collaborative thinking bodily resources such as “gestured drawings” and gestures, concrete materials such as 3D-foam and papers models, “low-tech” representations such as sketches and drawings by hand on paper and “high-tech” representations as CAD-drawings were used. These findings highlight the cognitive importance of tools and the use of bodily and material resources in students’ collaborative interactional work in a design setting. Furthermore, our study demonstrates that a focus primarily on digital technologies, as is often the case in the recent drive towards “digital learning”, would be highly problematic