Authors: Pedro Leão Ramos Ferreira Neto, Margarida Amaral. This case study was conducted by the senior lecturer in charge of the Computer Architectural Aided Design (CAAD) course, with the support and active collaboration of Instituto de Recursos e Iniciativas Comuns da Universidade do Porto (IRICUP). CAAD is an optional course for fifth-year students at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP).

1. CAAD and e-learning: a blended approach
Pedro Leão Neto, FAUP, University of Porto
Margarida Amaral, IRICUP, University of Porto
Summary
This case study was conducted by the senior lecturer in charge of the Computer Architectural Aided
Design (CAAD) course, with the support and active collaboration of Instituto de Recursos e Iniciativas
Comuns da Universidade do Porto (IRICUP). CAAD is an optional course for fifth-year students at the
Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP).
The course evolves in a collaborative environment (teacher/student and student/student) to facilitate
the exchange of ideas and design communication and the creation of an efficient learning context. The
theoretical and empirical bases of the course highlight the concern that the potential of computers for
communicating urban design should be used with critical awareness. Thus, the goal is to point out
specific attributes for different representation methods and make students think about why they use
different computer techniques and representations for presenting their design.
Within this context, it was important to adopt a set of teaching methods, communication techniques
and specific software that enabled this course to differ from the traditional methods of teaching:
demonstrative lecturing and students adopting a more or less passive role in the process. After
innovating in relation to the tools used in the process of teaching/learning, one should not forget to
change the methodologies to encourage students to engage in discussion and adopt an active role in
the process. In my point of view, this must be the main goal. This was achieved through several types
of information and software utilities, not only from a distance perspective, but also in relation to the
face-to-face interaction in classes, where a problem solving approach for each group as their
communication projects evolved was used.
The results from this case study highlighted, among other things, that the learning process that
emerges from the creative use of an e-learning platform strengthens the teachers’ capacity to work as
a team. This means that this technology worked as a real catalyst for a new teacher/student
interaction, making communication much easier and giving the students a more active role in the
learning process.
Keywords
CAAD, e-learning, blended, communication
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2. Context
Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) aims at giving fifth year students theoretical and
empirical grounds in Computer Graphics (CG) applied to communicating urban design. The objective
is to make the students critically aware of CG as medium for communicating design and urban space
rather than focusing on the technical and operative dominion of CG software.
The course is conducted through theoretical and empirical lectures. The objective of the theoretical
lectures is to give students’ the necessary knowledge for developing critical awareness and
questioning the use of computers for communicating urban design. The objective of the empirical
lectures is to create the right environment for developing individual and collective authorship urban
design communication projects.
The Department intranet, the E-learning platform (WebCT) and the www play an important role in the
infra-structure of the course because it is through them that students can more easily access each
others information, communicate their projects or establish other contacts with outside groups or
institutions (non FAUP).
Within this context, it was important to adopt a set of teaching methods, communication techniques
and software that enabled the course to distance it from the traditional methods of teaching: expositive
lecturing and students adopting a more or less passive roll in the process. Thus the objective was to
encourage students to discussion / debate between themselves and teacher and to make them adopt
an active role in the process. This was achieved by using several types of information and software
utilities, both from E-learning platform and other software linked to it by internet, which stimulated the
exchange of ideas. Face to face interaction in classes was also stimulated by technology and enabled
adopting a problem solving approach for each group as their communication projects evolved.
Objectives
One of the objectives was to experiment an e-learning platform and integrate the e-learning project of
the university. After one year of work I’ve gained acquaintance with the strategies of the institution and
meet other working colleagues that share an interest for technologies in education.
About the use of WebCT and taking into account the specificity of this CAAD course, we consider
important that the use of the platform would encourage a new way of teaching and ease the process of
creating a community of inquiry. Thus we mark out the following list of objectives to achieve:
Encourage a critical awareness in students and make them question the use of different
-
representation methods – digital and non-digital - and the different techniques for
communicating urban design;
Promote exercises which lead to a critical awareness of the learning process and the students’
-
empirical work;
Allow the exchange of ideas and provide significant autonomy for students to develop their
-
empirical work, encouraging the additional contact of students with teacher beyond classes;
Facilitate the publishing of stimulating didactic material, the exchange of ideas and interactive
-
tasks;
Facilitate the access to different types of information and create a global and specific
-
bibliography with some interactive capabilities.
Strategy and Model
The pedagogical strategy and adopted methodology have as fundamental pillars: encouraging and
facilitating the communication and exchange of ideas between teacher and students; making possible
for students to have an active role in the whole pedagogical process so that their interest for the
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3. course’s content is sharpened, group work and interaction are promoted and their autonomy and
responsibility towards developing and finalizing their empirical work is strengthened.
Accordingly, in a first stage, the aspects related with the structure and function of the CAAD online
course – objectives, methodology, program, bibliography and online course library – were described to
the students and some tutoring about the tools was done. The sequential hierarchy structure of some
of the course’s content, as well as other type of structure i.e. tree structured information through
several links were explained as well as how the students should upload, download and manipulate
their communication projects in the platform.
I must say that the empirical work (student’s communication projects) developed around and within the
WebCT platform was, in fact, the main catalyser of class’ synergies.
In a second stage, didactic materials and theoretical content structure were given to students through
the platform to facilitate the linking of all these different but integrated domains. In this way, we try to
obtain the highest possible degree of integration of WebCT, intranet and www in our course. The
major teaching benefits that these allow are the promotion of a swift or intense exchange of
information, ideas or experience between people. In this way, it is possible to introduce into the course
the concept of collective authorship and interest-rating system. Collective authorship means that each
communication project is centred in group work. The interest-rating system means that because each
group can vote at the end of each phase on another group’s work and some communication projects
may be selected by many groups and others not. In this way we also promote an atmosphere where
creative collaboration is the rule and not the exception because the students are invited to look at the
work of others and search them for the qualities which can be developed in the next phase. The
students' relationship while working can in this way be enriched and more energy applied to the
completion of the design project in hand.
E-learning tools
Both linear, hypertext and tree structured information (mindmap) was used, as we believe they are all
needed. Different types of digital material were employed to support theoretical and practical classes.
It was seen the importance of demonstrative animated videos for learning some software operations
as well as other similar animations for other products. A different functionality, which also was of great
importance, was the making of an online content library Lincoteca. This was so because it allowed for
students to research content pages and sites very related with the course as well as other information
and links which were new.
WebCT and CAAD site were, in fact, a complete integral part of the course. In this way, to allow an
area of the platform where data storage, sharing of information and all the sites of each group could be
placed and assessed, we used the e-learning operator students presentations (see figure 1). This tool
allowed access to a disk space of the server from where every student could visualize the work of
others, allowing complete autonomy and responsibility of students in relation to how their work
evolved.
Figure 1 – Students presentation and Home
page a group in CAAD site
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4. It was our intention to explore thoroughly all the platform tools and to make use at the same time of
software in the Internet considered of interest for CAAD The main objectives, in this case, were:
Allow synchronous communication between teacher and student beyond the classes’ time.
-
For this purpose the chat tool was used;
Create a place in the platform where each student would write an abstract about the group’s
-
work and his collaboration. For that purpose the quiz tool was used.
Create a place within the platform encouraging the exchange of ideas and informal
-
assessment of group works from students. For that purpose we employed a Web tool and
linked it to the platform through the quiz tool. This allowed students to vote informally
indicating which work they thought more interesting, and write any comment they thought to
be important and visualize graphically the results of the pool.
Create a tool that could help the public to navigate through the CAAD site: [navegation help]
-
was placed in Course menu to help people from outside University or other places (as guests)
which visited the CAAD site - http://webct.up.pt/public/CAAD/index.html
It was important, besides other things, to know if the e-learning platform had, in fact, influenced
positively the students learning process and if that had significant results in terms of their final marks.
Results
To obtain more accurate results the number of students that never came to classes were not
contemplated in this study. Being conscious of the importance of e-learning platforms in our
technological societies and of the necessity to collect great number and variety of case studies about
their use, we hope that the present case study and its qualitative and quantitative data and analysis
may contribute to yield some light over these matters.
In the first place, we compared the marks obtained by students of precedent year [2003 – 2004] with
the year 2004 – 2005. This was so because the subject matter of 2004 – 2005 CAAD program started
to be lectured only at 2003 – 2004 and only in 2004 – 2005 the e-learning platform was used. The
results showed that there were no significant differences between the means of students’ marks from
different year [Mann-Whitney; p= 0.05], also the students’ highest and lower marks did not show any
significant difference. It is important to draw attention to the fact that while in 2003 – 2004 there was no
e-learning platform, there was an online component in CAAD. This fact, by itself, may well explain why
no significant differences were found, although the p=0.05 value may be suggestive.
With the statistical data that we had, it was important to know if there was any influence between (i) the
student final mark, (ii) the student number of hits to platform, (iii) the student number of read
documents and (iv) the student number of sent documents. Thus we proceeded with the following
statistical analysis.
After applying Spearman rank order correlation tests between (i), (ii), (iii) and (iv), we obtained the
following results (Table 1). The results show, besides other things, that a low positive correlation exists
between the students final marks (i) and the students total number of hits (ii) [r2 = 0.071; p = 0.036];
students final marks and number of read documents [r2 = 0.27; p = 0.0] and students final marks and
number of sent documents [r2 = 0.18; p = 0.0].
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5. Correlations
Final Total Read Sent
mark hits documents documents
Spearman's Correlation
1,000 ,268(*) ,525(**) ,433(**)
rho Coefficient
Sig. (1-tailed)
Final mark . ,036 ,000 ,001
N
46 46 46 46
Correlation
,268(*) 1,000 ,717(**) ,331(*)
Coefficient
Sig. (1-tailed)
Total hits ,036 . ,000 ,012
N
46 46 46 46
Correlation
,525(**) ,717(**) 1,000 ,464(**)
Coefficient
Read Sig. (1-tailed)
,000 ,000 . ,001
documents
N
46 46 46 46
Correlation
,433(**) ,331(*) ,464(**) 1,000
Coefficient
Sent Sig. (1-tailed)
,001 ,012 ,001 .
documents
N
46 46 46 46
* Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (1-tailed).
** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (1-tailed).
Table 1 – Results of Spearman rank order correlation tests
We believe that the positive results obtained may be explained, besides other motives, because of the
following reasons: (a) the objective and real existence of e-learning tools and (b) the dynamic that was
created in CAAD.
It is important to refer that from all the different tools and information available through the e-learning
platform (content pages) and CAAD site pages –subject matter for each web communication exercise,
theoretical data, tutorials, specific analysis and examples, online bibliography, and other material alike
– we noted the following:
Generally, the students that showed to have more total hits, were the ones that used more the
-
e-learning tools organizer pages and content pages;
Generally, all students in the class show a significant and consistent use of quiz, calendar and
-
mail tools.
In the end of the semester a pedagogic inquiry was given to students and they were encouraged to
complete it. From the total number o 58 students, 30 completed the inquiry. The students when asked
about the positive aspects of the platform answered in majority, besides other things, (a1) that the use
of the e-learning platform had as result a higher interaction between teacher and students. Then, (a2)
there is a majority of students that agree that the use of communication tools allows a closer
communication between teacher and students. Lastly, (a3) there is a majority of students that think
that the existence of an online infrastructure helped to motivate students and heightened the course
performance.
Conclusions
It was clear that the new generation knows well and is familiarised with technology and that the
learning process through an e-learning platform, when used efficiently, strengthens our capacities for
working as a team and functions as a real catalyser for a new relation and interaction
teacher/student(s). In fact, the positive way that this academic year evolved, when this was the first
time an e-learning platform was adopted to teach CAAD, shows, besides other things, that it is
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6. possible to adopt with success a blended learning approach with these technologies with the objective
of creating a significant community of inquiry.
It was possible through the use of the platform to develop a learning strategy that
(a) facilitated the learning process;
(b) motivated the students to work and
(c) promoted communication and interaction between students and teachers. In fact, after
analysing the results, weight is given to the following ideas and conclusions.
The number of visits to the CAAD site showed to be significantly correlated with the final marks
obtained by the students (see Table 1). It was possible to create an online structure that allowed
students to have a greater autonomy, flexibility and responsibility in the learning process: they played
a new active role in this process. The results also support this thought the majority of students said
that consulting and accessing the didactic material of the course was encouraged by the use of the e-
learning platform and that its structure and interactive possibilities helped the learning process (see
a1, a2 and a3).
It is important to say that the use of the platform also helped to achieve a significant blend between the
learning objectives and the pedagogical methods. This means, for example, that the e-learning
platform gave the students the necessary tools for communication and representation that allowed
them to evolve in group work and to communicate between them and the teacher more efficiently.
It is also relevant to point out that technologies should always be analysed critically having in mind the
scientific and pedagogical objectives of the course and not the other way round. If this does not
happen, the risk of falling into a kind of technological tyranny is higher. We believe that this did not
happen in CAAD and that important steps were given in order to develop a community of inquiry within
a blended learning process. This means, besides other things,
(1) encouraging and facilitating communication and exchange of ideas between students and
teachers through the platform and in classes;
(2) making it possible for the student to have an active role in the learning process,
encouraging them to develop group projects and to debate ideas and
(3) monitoring the web communication projects, helping to integrate in a critical way the
technical component and the artistic and the practice with the theory: analysing critically the
works with students, analysing the best ways to use the software tools for achieving the
objectives of each communication exercise.
It seems clear that the pedagogical model behind the subject matter of the CAAD course and the
learning modes adopted are more linked to the idea of making students an active part of that process
than in the traditional lecturing process. In fact, there was a significant concern in trying to explore and
use an interactive learning process focused on the groups, encouraging critical analysis and feedback
and leading students to gain autonomy and play an active role in the learning process. Within this
context, it is also important to point out that the students, when asked about the positive aspects of the
platform, answered in majority, besides other things, that the use of the e-learning platform had as
result a higher interaction between teacher and students. Then, there was a majority of students that
agreed that the use of communication tools allows a closer communication between teacher and
students. All this is not new because CAAD and Design teaching in many institutions show us that
computers can and must be used as means of expression and not as ends by themselves. It can also
be seen how the creative work is enriched if the right conditions for communication and interaction
between the principle players of the learning process [students and teachers} are achieved
(Neuckermans 1999).
To finalize, we draw attention to the results obtained from qualitative and quantitative student’s
responses to pedagogical inquiry, and also for the final marks obtained and frequency of the e-learning
platform use. These results point out clearly, besides other things, that the integration of this platform
in the CAAD learning process allowed achieving more efficiency. This efficiency can be seen by the
final marks of students and most importantly by the pedagogical process that was adopted. Two
important vectors of this process can characterize it: (i) higher motivation and (ii) higher participation.
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7. In fact, the majority of students answered that the existence of an online infrastructure helped to
motivate them and heightened the course performance, and that the e-learning platform gave them the
possibility to communicate and work outside University settings and hours. Then they also
acknowledged that the e-learning platform gave them the necessary tools for communication and
representation that allowed them to evolve in group work and to communicate between them and the
teacher more efficiently. The e-learning platform strengthened, in fact, the group work and interaction,
allowing a bigger and wider participation and tutoring. All this really points out that the learning process
efficiency can be obtained when technology is used to create a rich cognitive and emotional context
and that quantified tests and evaluation scales should naturally also reflect that richness: the result of
an interactive process between students and teachers.
References
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research. Edited by H. G. Neuckermans, B., Computers in design studio teaching. Leuven:
K.U.Leuven.
4. Lima, J.R. e Capitão, Z. 2003. e - Learning e e - Conteúdos. Aplicação das teorias tradicionais e
modernas de ensino e aprendizagem à organização e estruturação de e - cursos. Londres:
RoutledgeFalmer.
5. Neuckermans, H.; Geebelen, B., ed. 1999. Computers in design studio teaching. Leuven: K.U.
Leuven Dept. of Architecture.
6. Oxman, R., ed. 1999. Thought, Representation and Design in the Electronic Design Studio. Edited
by H. G. Neuckermans, B., Computers in design studio teaching. Leuven: K.U.Leuven.
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8. Authors
Pedro Leão Ramos Ferreira Neto
Senior Lecturer. in CAAD
Faculty of Architecture of Porto University
pleao@arq.up.pt
Margarida Amaral
Multimedia Project Coordinator
University of Porto, IRICUP
mamaral@iric.up.pt
Citation instruction
Leão Ramos Ferreira Neto, Pedro and Amaral, Margarida (2007). CAAD and e-learning: a blended
approach. eLearning Papers, no. 3. ISSN 1887-1542.
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