Over the passed 20 weeks everyone in this studio has worked on two open source learning academies, reviewed countless others, and even visited some leading examples in the open source teaching field (UNO, E3Civic, High Tech High, etc.) Although visiting these schools was extremely helpful, each school had its own unique twist on the system. Personally seeing each organization allowed me to compare & contrast and ultimately attain a hybrid idea of open source learning.

What were the primary challenges you faced in designing for open source learning environments?

Scale

The hardest thing for me throughout the quarter was the constant back and forth in scale. Because of the complex program, we had to figure out how all these individual spaces worked architecturally and then link these ideas together as a whole. The building size itself was larger than I had ever worked with but it presented a problem that required multiple angles of thought, which got fulfilled by our class discussions.

The New Project

Taking over someone else project was a completely different experience since we started with a project that was  (in our eyes) fully developed, or at least as far as we’d ever taken it.  On top of that we got partnered up and at first this was a pretty scary idea, all quarter long for 3 integrated classes. The team project therefor also completely changed the way studio, and architectural design worked. Overall it was a very lesson filled experience since having to both agree on an entire project is a long process of compromising and redesigning.

The Family Table

Looking back at the quarter I think the best way to describe open source learning is through our family table. Whenever we did some sort of work, or came back from a lecture we would come together around the central table. At the start of the winter quarter coming together meant putting up our work and hoping it was up to par, dreading the idea of getting called on as a poor example. But as the 20 weeks evolved the table brought us closer as peers, reviewers, future architects, and friends and the discussions evolved from the required topics to the farthest tangents that still had a significant influence on the open source topic. The meetings at the start of class evolved in a sharing of ideas that ultimately help us all develop models and diagrams we had never done before. In my mind if we want our education to evolve, we need to move from a lecture based style of teaching to a discussion based style of teaching. So if I’m left with any questions, theres only one:

“Why doesn’t everybody have a family table?”