From Study-Abroad to Study-at-Home: Teaching Cross-Cultural Design Thinking During COVID-19

Abstract

Undergraduate degrees at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) require ''Flags'' in each of six areas: (1) Cultural Diversity in the United States; (2) Ethics; (3) Global Cultures; (4) Independent Inquiry;(5) Quantitative Reasoning; and (6) Writing. Courses that carry the Global Cultures Flag guide students in exploring the practices, beliefs, and histories of at least one non-US cultural group, and encourage reflection on one's own cultural experiences. Many engineering students are excited to learn about global cultures in the context of their discipline through faculty-led study-abroad. 8 Currently, there are 11 engineering courses carrying a Global Cultures Flag, 10 of which are faculty-led study-abroad. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has prevented almost 400 of our engineering students from participating in faculty-led study-abroad. Our challenge was to quickly transition a faculty-led study-abroad carrying a Global Cultures Flag to an online format.

Some Web-Based Experiences from Flipped Classroom Techniques in AEC Modules during the COVID-19 Lockdown

“…Diverse studies focused on evaluating the readiness of lecturers and the feasibility of LMS [40,41], others on collecting students' perceptions [42][43][44], on analyzing the impact of the online format on studying at home [44,45], on learning achievements [46,47], and on the efficiency of flipped teaching methods [44,[48][49][50][51][52]]. It appears that blended learning methods have suffered less than other teaching approaches during this sudden shift to remote teaching [51].…”