Introduction and evaluation of an online assessment to enhance first year Urban and Environmental Planning students’ time-on-task

Abstract

Planning studios are taught following 'learning by doing' approach to help students with a range of practical skills highly relevant to the planning profession. The problem is that not all students spend the required hours, to work on the hands-on activities, between the weekly studio sessions. They fall behind and it becomes more and more difficult for them to catch up as the semester progresses. The paper follows the 'Community of Inquiry' framework and proposes an online assessment task to ensure that three elements of teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence are still strongly felt during the week when there is no face-to-face contact between the teaching team and students. The proposed 'Online Studio Diary' task aims to encourage students to actively engage with their learning tasks outside classroom. The paper also includes a range of evaluation techniques adopted to investigate the impact of the new assessment on learning outcomes. The proposed online assignment task could be understood as a much needed innovation in using technology for learning in studio teaching.