Students around New Zealand are having to change the way they learn while in COVID-19 lockdown, including the 120 studying landscape architecture at Lincoln’s School of Landscape Architecture. Landscape Architecture Aotearoa asked school head, Dr Gill Lawson, how things were going.

LAA: How disruptive is the lockdown to students learning?

GL: These are highly unusual and unprecedented circumstances. The University is doing all it can to minimise any disruptions to their studies. We are committed to supporting the academic success of all our students and ensuring that their study plans proceed as normally as possible given the COVID-19 constraints.

Landscape architecture emergency remote teaching (ERT), has required our staff to be quite creative with technology to continue to help our students progress through our design studios, theory, and outdoor site-based courses. Software courses continue to be largely self-paced with additional help sessions.

ERT is a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode due to crisis circumstances.

LAA: How are they continuing with their lessons?

GL: The University has suspended all teaching and assessment activities for semester one courses until Monday, 20 April, when online delivery will begin. It’s extending Semester 1 by one week.

This means that term two will start on 20 April as week six, with lectures ending seven weeks later on 5 June. Exams will begin a week later on 15 June, with a study week in between.

There will be different requirements for each course in terms of assessments, assignments and exams, so students must check all of their course outlines on LEARN.

We were able to test some of our remote teaching approaches before the mid-semester break with some of our students and so far they seem to be continuing very successfully with their project work.

LAA: What special plans have you had to put in place?

GL: Our design studios, practical and theory courses are using Microsoft Teams with live lectures and concurrent chat for student questions during the lectures. Students, particularly international students, seem to be more at ease with asking questions in the online environment than in the F2F studio context. This may be an unexpectedly positive outcome for us in the COVID-19 world.

For individual crits we are allocating groups of students to individual tutors for design crits and further help sessions for individual Q & A sessions.

LAA: Have you been able to ensure that all students have the necessary technology to learn from home?

GL: We have asked students and staff to ‘attend’ sessions for testing our communication technology in various ways for maximum functionality. We are still discovering various restrictions for some people and are looking for ways to work around these challenges.

Students are also asked to please check they can access LEARN on their devices.

So that we know they can access all assessment online via LEARN wherever they are located, they need to answer these questions: