Designing teaching—teaching designing: Teacher’s guidance in a virtual design studio

Abstract

This study examined pedagogical aspects of virtual designing. It focused on how an industrial design teacher organised a university course in plastic product design and how the teacher guided student teams’ design processes in a virtual design studio. The model of Learning by Collaborative Design was used as a pedagogical and analytical framework. The study employed qualitative content analysis of the teacher’s notes posted to the Moodle database. The results indicated that teaching exhibited three characteristic approaches: problem-driven, solution-driven and procedural-driven. The teacher’s notes were predominantly solution-driven statements, including new information, design ideas and evaluating design. The present results demonstrate the link between the model of Learning by Collaborative Design and the three teaching approaches.