Transitioning from face-to-face teaching to emergency remote teaching in landscape architecture

Abstract

Landscape Architecture is a relatively young profession, and its pedagogy has evolved with time to keep up with technological advancements. Like Architecture and most design disciplines, Landscape Architecture is a project-based discipline with a focus on design process. It is based on experiential learning through field trips and site visits and is at the intersection of multiple disciplines while being site and context specific (location, culture, history, ecology, geomorphology, perception, seasonality, etc.). Today, teaching in Landscape Architecture mandates every school to graduate students with the required skills, knowledge, and values to form competent professionals. With COVID-19, the world confronted an unprecedented pandemic that affected the entire planet; more specifically, the education field had to continue delivering courses and classes remotely to make sure students could continue or finish their degrees. Being a site-centric program, Landscape Architecture faces new challenges when confronted to moving online. COVID-19 showed that traditional teaching methods lacked flexibility and needed to adapt to the fast-evolving digital world. This article reviews how an undergraduate landscape architecture program has addressed issues around remote teaching for its studios, theory, and practical courses with a direction to the future. We emphasize the difference between Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) and Online Teaching (OT). ERT has been applied in courses that were originally not designed to be taught online. In this paper, we report on how we managed the transition from Face-to-Face (F2F) to ERT. We analyze the challenges and opportunities that arose in the process and discuss their potential influence on shaping the future of our teaching Landscape Architecture programs. The results presented in the paper are based on one semester (semester 1, February to June 2020) that was characterized by a New Zealand wide COVID-19 lockdown, which forced all universities to discontinue F2F teaching. However, this is just the beginning of a reflective process. The aim of this article is to bring forward the discussion about whether there is an opportunity for design disciplines to evolve in a new pedagogical direction where blended teaching methods can promote more effective teaching.