When spring semester study moved online in mid-March, suddenly Zoom or Blue Jeans or Panopto was as integral to teaching at the Weitzman School as the mastery of a subject and a commitment to students’ learning. In working to keep standards high and spirits up, some faculty members saw an opportunity to experiment and rethink their approach to material they had taught before. Faculty in the departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, City and Regional Planning, Fine Arts, and Historic Preservation adapted their courses for the screen, and found rewards and constraints in the process.
Allison Lassiter, Randall Mason, Michael Luegering, Joshua Mosley, Richard Farley, and Michael Henry each had unique hurdles to clear in tailoring their classes to online learning. Some classes had to replace fabrication materials, labs, and kilns with photogrammetry and 3D scan samples.
“A student who was working with concrete and casting came up with the idea of making molds out of ice, because we didn’t have any mold-making material on hand that was safe to use in the home,” says Joshua Mosley. “The student who was fusing glass started to fuse food waste and use the pores of the glass bricks to retain water for growing plants.”
For Allison Lassiter in the Department of City and Regional Planning, a switch to remote learning necessitated a partnership with the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Innovation and Technology. “The intent of the Sensing the City class is to learn about digital urban interventions and then work in groups to create and build prototypes for these interventions, so it was sort of impossible to transition to a virtual class, and I had to totally reconceptualize it.”
Read more at Weitzman News.
