Abstract

Spatial Planning is a master course for graduate students of Environmental Engineering. The course is based on assumptions that students’ future work will be connected with spatial planning, and spatial issues will have an influence on their everyday lives. To familiarize students with environmental issues in planning, the teams of students get an assignment to design an urban space, waterfront along a stream. The whole project consists of four subprojects logically linked with each other. To prepare students for public engagement in planning, collaborative learning elements have been implemented. A variety of blended learning and collaborative learning activities have been designed. Traditional face-to-face classes involve lectures, staff consultation hours, project work, presentations and open discussions for all students enrolled for the course. E-learning components have been developed in Moodle, and they include activities such as: building an open glossary, voting on presentations and others. Moodle platform is also used as a database of students’ subprojects and presentations in read-only mode. Moreover, it allows assessing the results of student work according to defined criteria, creating databases of links to data sources, encouraging student public participation by informing them about open meetings, conferences and seminars. The students also use other open source systems such as GIS (Geographical Information Systems), WMS (Web Map Systems), institutions websites and CAD software for data visualization. The main problems that appeared while running the course were mostly connected to collaborative team work and failure of additional activities, which were only used by a few students (the quiz was an exception). The course was evaluated anonymously by students, who gave several pieces of advice on course improvement, mainly on collaborative work. This article presents the structure of the course and correlation between collaborative learning and blended learning and its effects. The problems that appeared during the first year of the course are discussed below. The conclusions drawn from the analysis of the course will be used as guidelines for future improvements of the Spatial Planning teaching process.

Authors (3)