MOOCs, e-learning and Beyond: Exploring the Future of Virtual Built Environment Teaching

On Tuesday 1st July 2014, Alexi Marmot hosted the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies’ Future Pedagogy Conference. The event was opened by Alan Penn, Dean of the Bartlett, who, reflecting on the history and establishment of UCL as a global university for all, speculated that had it been established in contemporary times, it would have been a MOOC.

MOOCs or “Massive Open Online Courses” are entirely online courses aimed at an unlimited community of students. This has been a relatively recent development in distance learning but is growing in popularity at an exponential rate, due to the open nature of this learning process. 

The nature of the conference was centred on the process of MOOC delivery, and how this might affect built environment education. There was an interesting mix of speakers ranging from developers of MOOC learning platforms such as Daphne Koller, of Coursera, to lecturers in design and specification of the built environment delivering material , such as Architecture part 3 training, in an increasingly digital way.

AMA is already involved in the research of future pedagogy, and looking into its impact on university estates for some of our clients, we were therefore delighted to be present at this event. The subjects discussed were highly interesting and thought provoking in terms of how this could change the way universities might use space in the future. For a summary of the conference please follow this link, and if you would like to know more about MOOCs, please click here.