Design Teaching and Learning in Covid-19 Times: An International Experience

The present article is about the academic partnership between the University of Campinas (Campinas, Brazil) and the Lusófona University (Lisbon, Portugal) for the adoption of a distance-learning methodology to students in the first year of Architecture and Urbanism at UNICAMP during COVID-19 lockdown. The contents from the online course “Drawing for Graphic Diary” were made available to UNICAMP students with minor adaptions. Three didactic practices were implemented to face the pandemic restrictions: 1) biweekly tasks to be done in the LusofonaX – Digital Academy LMS environment; 2) online advice to students to resolve doubts; 3) online synchronous classes with course teachers detailing the exercises and visual expressive modalities. The course design assessment was done through questionnaires that were carried out to students using Google Forms at two different moments: 1) before the course, to identify pre-existing skills and available knowledge about drawing concepts. For this, the authors depart from the following eight concepts as indicators of pre-existing competences for drawing: conic projection, two-dimensionality, surface, three-dimensionality, vanishing point, perspective construction, visual field and visual expression. After the course (2), to assess the perceived evolution of these same concepts through self-reported measures about the perceived knowledge acquired by students. Final student evaluation for the course was accessed with the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Results from the t-Tests and the NPS point to the success of the course methodology to deliver distance learning in the subject of design teaching compared to regular classes.