Challenges of Teaching Design During COVID-19 Pandemic: A Pedagogy to Teach Design Online

Teaching design or architectural design is a difficult task, because it requires setting of various entities and benchmarks to accomplish the intended design. For example, while teaching design instructors take account of decisions making, schematic design, timeline and assessment, and sequence of learning objectives. During the COVID-19 pandemic, design instructors found it hard to teach and present architectural design. This study identified that student output in design courses was unsatisfactory during the pandemic; in fact, it was highly compromised. Consequently, the principal aim of this study was to understand how to improve the conventional design pedagogy to teach design through the virtual classroom and create a methodology to teach design online. This is a review study and methodology followed is a literature review, that blends descriptive and exploratory research. In this regard, the literature review was conducted across three domains: issues of teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, conventional teaching of design, and exploration of teaching methods appropriate for the pandemic. Further, this study discusses the triangulation of three factors: teaching during the pandemic, conventional teaching methods, and the use of facets of content focus (CF) and support learning (SL) teaching methods to design a pedagogy (teaching model) that adapts from not only the CF and SL models but also the conventional design teaching methods. The results of this research indicate a blended teaching method and guidelines to streamline academic activities to teach design online.