While computer-based technologies provide a rich, multimedia environment that in many ways surpasses what can be accomplished in the classroom, many distance education courses rely primarily on text-based resources and a largely transmissive approach to teaching and learning. In this respect, they are little different from traditional methods of teaching. In particular, they fail to "teach around the cycle" or to address learning styles and personalities beyond the verbal, sequential-thinking "INTJ's."

To reach a larger population of learners, and to better serve those with learning styles that differ from that of the ideal student, distance education must employ a wider array of teaching methodologies. It must find ways to foster learning in a group or social context where shared meanings and the appreciation of different points of view can be developed. It must employ this rich medium to appeal to visual and kinesthetic learners, and help develop more non-linear, holistic, creative problem-solving skills that learners can employ in their daily lives.

The architectural design studio offers a prime example of a collaborative, multi-sensory, learner-centered, constructivist, experiental problem-based teaching environment that distance education can seek to create in order to break away from the model of isolated self-directed study programs designed primarily for highly the motivated independent learner.

Three key attributes of the studio model provide lessons for distance learning. The first falls squarely along Moore's axis of dialogue: the high levels of interaction between learner and teacher, among learners, and between the learner and the content and the medium of instruction. In the case of architectural design education, the content, the methods and the medium of instruction are almost inseparable. Distance learning should strive to go beyond being primarily a mechanim used to convey large amounts of information to an individual learner, to one that facilitates higher levels of interaction and active knowledge construction.

Fostering a high level of interchange is matter of technique, rather than technology. Given a reason to communicate, students will make use whatever technology is available: asynchronous text messaging, bulletin boards, and email; near-synchronous instant messaging and chat rooms, and fully-synchronous Internet audio and videoconferencing. The variety of communications channels now available allow different methods to be used for different types of communication, from broadcast announcements, to private conferences between teacher and student, to group discussions among students outside the teacher's presence.

For students accustomed to time-constrained classroom settings dominated by the lecture format, getting actively involved may be a welcome change allowing them to express themselves; others prefer to simply watch and listen. Distance learners report that they have enjoyed participating in (and for many "witness learners," observing) a far higher degree of interaction with the teacher and classmates through online communications technologies than they had ever experienced in face to face classes. It requires a much higher degree of engagement with learners (such as providing individual and group feedback) than most classroom instructors are used to providing. The design studio offers a methodology for engagement at the individual and group level: students working in a shared workspace on individual and group projects; frequent individual consultations (which others in the class are allowed to observe) focusing on the individual student's efforts and providing immediate feedback; informal group progress reviews where students practice presenting their work and analyzing and critiquing that of their classmates; formal reviews providing the opportunity for a summative evaluation. These interactions are not contrived discussions to review the students' understanding of materials that they have studied outside of class; they are integral part of a process where content is created through the use of the medium.

The second aspect of the studio model that can help distance education reduce transactional distance is individualization, the essence of Moore's axis of "structure." An example of a course with a low level of individualization would be one in which all of the assignments are of the same nature, such as completing a battery of problem sets or writing a 1200-word paper on a prescribed topic. In the studio, there is no single solution to a design problem, and no single approach to solving it. While there will be a schedule for submissions and presentations, there is no fixed sequence in which specific learning objectives must be met. Each student progresses on an individual path to understanding how to define a problem, devise potential solutions, and evaluate their appropriateness.

Distance educators can provide individualization by offering multiple pathways through the content for different types of learners (inductive and deductive reasoners, convergent and divergent thinkers, or verbal and visually oriented learners). Another way to address the need for individualization is to vary the approach in different parts of a course so that all students have the opportunity to experience different modes of learning, and to excel in the areas of their strengths—teaching "around the cycle." A third option is to give students more choice and flexibility in their assignments, allowing them to pursue individual interests. Courses can be structured so as to give students more of an opportunity to set their own individual pace through the material.

Designing a course with multiple pathways and options that will be appropriate for many different types of learner can be a Herculean effort that might best be left to the textbook publishers. For "lone ranger" instructors, the answer may be to design a course with a flexible structure that can vary with and be shaped by the interaction variable. This is the model epitomized by the design studio. The effort of designing the course then shifts from the preparatory phase (a point at which the nature of the learners may be unknown) to the execution and evaluation phases, providing the learners a greater opportunity to shape their learning experience, and (in Moore's and Garrison's terms) to share control over the transaction.

The third aspect of the studio model that can improve diatance education is its emphasis on learning through actually doing in a mutisensory mode. Making drawings, building models, viewing them and manipulating them, help develop a far more holistic understanding than one can achieve by the strictly sequential processes of reading and writing. Employment of these senses allows students to grasp concepts and make new associations that are essential to creative thinking. One does not learn to design by reading and hearing lectures (in Kolb's model, "reflective observation") but through active experimentation and concrete experience. Likewise, a science student can read about the principles and properties of a gyroscope, but never achieve an internalized understanding that would allow one to apply this knowledge intuitively without seeing the gyroscope in operation and feeling it balanced on one's fingertip. In traditional educational settings, this broader, more sensory type of understanding is afforded by real-time demonstrations and in the laboratory. The challenge for distance education is to bring experiential learning online. More extensive use of multiple media is a beginning.

Demonstration in an introductory chemistry course, Montgomery College

The advantages of using technology in the classroom have become too compelling to be overlooked. A particular advantage is that they make it possible not only to convey large amounts of information, but to store and retrieve it, and organize it in different ways. One of the problems faced by many students is in trying to take accurate notes of a lecture, while at the same time trying to listen and grasp the meaning that the instructor seeks to convey. Unless the lecturer has provided an outline (an "advance organizer"), the overall structure of the presentation may not become apparent until it is over. In a sequential, oral presentation, the note-taker has only one chance to "get it right," and the burden of recording leaves little time for assimilation or reflection. The opportunity for the student to restructure the information in a more meaningful way will be impaired. The sequential method of delivery, whether orally or by text, becomes less and less useful when it is being used to describe events which are occurring simultaneously.

A digital presentation made available to the student avoids many of these problems. Students can pay more attention in class to understanding trends and concepts, rather than trying to record details. They are able to retrieve information accurately and go though it at their own pace, looking at it in different levels of detail and from different perspectives as they create new associations and derive meaning from the information.

Digital technologies also provide the advantage of explaining events which occur over a period of time, which can be slowed or suspended (such as to examine the progressive collapse of a building) or accelerated (such as to understand the growth of an urban area or the effects of global environmental changes). With a properly-equipped "smart" classroom and well-designed presentations, the instructor no longer needs to rely exclusively on a linear, verbal explanation of theories and concepts. Images, animation and video can illustrate processes as they unfold. For example, in a class on building construction, students can observe a series of construction site webcam images to see for themselves how construction progresses from site clearing and excavation to final completion, gaining a deeper understanding of the process and an appreciation for its complexity and the need to orchestrate this event through tight scheduling.

In the traditional classroom equipped only with a blackboard, the instructor may develop a series of diagrams or show students how to derive a formula on the wall (but may have to erase previous work to do so); at the end of the 50-minute class, attentive students will have copied these down in a notebook, providing them with a more or less accurate record of the completed diagram. Even if the end result is captured accurately, their notes are likely to provide little indication of the steps that were taken to arrive there. Students' ability to replicate the sequence of events that has led to the final stage will depend on a good recall as well as on accurate note-taking. Reviewing those notes for an exam may trigger that recall, but the presentation, once given, has been lost. On the other hand, the instructor who has reduced this derivation to a digital format (such as a sequence of PowerPoint slides) and made it available to the students has provided a resource which can be retrieved at will and reviewed at the student's own pace.

Many of the advantages of using digital technologies in design classes has previously been discussed. They can assist the student architect in developing the ability to think in three dimensional terms, and to consider the additional dimensions of time and motion. By more closely simulating reality, digital models give the architect a better understanding of how objects, materials, finishes and surfaces can be arranged and how they interact with each other and the people who will experience the spaces they describe. They allow the designer to investigate more alternatives at many more levels of detail, and test them against the constraints of the program.

As Kvan points out, the recording and storage capabilities of digital media allow problem-based learning to proceed to final phases of assessment and reflection, allowing students and reviewers to retrace the process of design to how that led to the different results on display at the final review. The focus shifts from the final images that have been produced to how they came about. In a profession that places an inordinate amount of attention on form, this would be a welcome change.

A particularly important aspect of technology for students of architecture is its nature as a communications medium, as revolutionary as the invention of paper and printing were in their time. The digital medium has created an unparalleled mechanism for distributing and sharing information nearly instantaneously without regard to one's physical location. This makes it possible to collaborate with others in ways never before possible.

Regardless of the educational opportunities that digital media and communications provide, the "bottom line" is that students need to learn to work in a digital environment if they are to survive in practice. While an architecture professor may be able to get through to retirement in the academic environment without learning new skills, the same is not true of the student. A review of classified ads will quickly confirm that literacy in CAD and other electronic tools of practice is an indispensable job skill. The ability to work and communicate digitally will be expected by one's employers, clients, consultants, and many others with whom the architect will have to deal.

However unlikely it may be that an architectural program will be offered entirely online, there are many benefits that can accrue from extending the use of technology in teaching to offering portions of the curriculum to students in a distance learning format. These benefits accrue to the school, the faculty, and to the students.

Benefits for schools. A program of distance education can reduce the need for facilities that are at a premium at a "brick and mortar" school. Operation of traditional studios on a 24x7 basis incurs high utility, staffing and security costs. Classrooms, computer labs, library and office space is limited, and requires substantial sums to construct, equip and maintain. While an online educational program requires a different type of investment (in an information technology infrastructure and learning management system software), most universities have such an infrastructure in place, and almost all students already have their own computers. The incremental cost for an architecture school to offer its courses online will be limited.

As the Boyer report (see Architectural education, The need for a connected curriculum) points out, there is a pressing need for architectural education to develop an outreach to the profession and the community at large. The conferences and symposia, guest lectures, intensive 3-day "charettes," all-day juries, field trips and social events that can broaden a student's experience and give them the opportunity to interact with members of the public (their future clients) and the profession can be difficult to coordinate around scheduled classes. In particular, the final weeks of a semester's design studio project tend to consume most of a student's time, making it difficult to conduct other classes during that period. More online classes could substantially reduce such scheduling conflicts.

Work-study programs are another way in which the recommendations of the Boyer report can be addressed, providing students with real-world work experience (which many schools and faculty members are unable or unwilling to provide). It would be natural for a school to place its students at the offices of its alumni, but this may require sending a student out of town (few employment opportunities exist for Cornell's architecture students in rural Ithaca, NY). Distance education programs could allow schools to free up enough time during regular business hours for students to participate in work-study programs.

Many schools have foreign studies programs, allowing students to spend a semester in cities such as Rome or Paris. One of the difficulties of such programs for students is that their core studies at the home institution are interrupted. Distance education is flexible enough to include both classrom and online students in the same class. Use of this technique would allow students to continue with their regular coursework—in company with their classmates&mdashwhile overseas.

Distance education does not necessarily mean that students are removed from each others' presence, only that there is a separation between them and the instructor. One benefit of distance education is that it would allow schools toprovide opportunities to interact with world-reknowned teachers, critics and reviewers whose schedules do not permit them to be on campus. A prime example is how MIT has been able to use Frank Gehry as a visiting critic in their virtual design studios (Yee, 2001).

The demands on schools to enrich their curricula put many of them in a difficult position, having to choose between worthy offerings because their enrollment and facilities will not support the variety of courses that they would like to offer. A distance education program offered by a regional consortium of schools (with appropriate credit transfer and tuition-sharing arrangements) can allow them to join together to capitalize on the strengths of each. Faculty talents from several schools can be pooled and put to better use, and students can gain valuable experience working in collabooration with those from other institutions. Their relative proximity would permit occasional face-to-face meetings, site visits, guest presentations, field trips, and final reviews.

Recent graduates during their intership period as well as established practitioners have a continuing need for the educational services that an architectural school can provide. A distance education program can position a school to reach the professional community with continuing professional education. Establishing a relationship with this community can improve the realism of architectural education and help attract the benefactors which a school needs for its financial support.

An important objective for architecture schools is to increase their diversity. A distance education can attract and serve a broader community of students, particularly those with work or family commitments or physical disabilities that make it difficult to attend regularly-scheduled classes.

Distance education also provides an opportunity for an architecture school to open its doors to the rest of the university. With studios in the afternoons, non-studio classes are concentrated in the mornings—causing scheduling conflicts for other students who might otherwise be interested in taking a few classes in architecture. Bringing in students from other academic areas can help a school financially (through the allocation of tuition), and politically (by expanding its visibility, presence, and contacts on campus). Opening up the school to other students can help educate the members of the lay public about architecture and the role of the architect, another important objective identified in the Boyer report.

Benefits for faculty. While most faculty members may have little interest in becoming online educators, the existence of an online program can be of benefit both for those who are teaching online and for those who are not. For those who are willing to take the plunge into distance learning, there are opportunities for teaching in new ways, to new groups of students, that are unavailable in the traditional face to face setting. Many online instructors do so for the intellectual challenge and the chance to improve their computer and online communication skills, and then learn that many of these new skills are directly transferable to the classroom.

For a school to be better connected to the outside profession and community, its faculty must also be connected. Few schools can afford to have more than one specialist in a particular area of study; these individuals may be intellectually isolated on a teaching staff in which no one shares that interest. Teaching at a distance can open up new opportunities for faculty members to interact with other professionals who share their interests, to develop shared electronic resources, and to engage in collaborative research. Teaching online also prepares a faculty member for new teaching opportunities, as continuing professional education expands, mandated by state licensing laws and professional organization.

A major benefit for online instructors is that it frees them from class hours and classrooms, allowing them more freedom to work outside the institution and pursue professional interests. The instructor no longer has to settle for a less-than-desirable time slot or classroom. Attendance at an out-of-town conference or a consulting engagement does not require rescheduling a class or finding a substitute teacher. The flexible teaching hours provide greater opportunities for instructors to stay more closely connected to the profession and the realities of practice by working in local offices.

Time flexibility means that the instructor is no longer constrained by the 50-minute class period, a MWF schedule, or holidays that take away a class session. Presentations no longer need to be trimmed or padded to fit within the allotted time period.

The absence of a fixed schedule for online courses also works to the advantage of other faculty members, who no longer have to compete for any particular segment of their students' time. A studio critic can schedule a review session with outside guests or take students on an out of town field trip without interfering with students' online classes or exams.

Benefits for students. Many of the benefits to the school and faculty are shared with the students, particularly the opportunities to engage in activities that would interfere with scheduled classes, to interact with the outside community, and, with appropriate credit-transfer, articulation and cost-sharing agreements, to study with students at other institutions.

Being a resident student at a college or university is expensive, and promises to become even more so. Many students can't keep it up for 6 or more years, and taking a year or two off from school to work, then returning, is difficult. While distance education rarely comes at a discount, it does offer students the ability to schedule their time to permit them to work, defraying some of the costs of their education and allowing them to be better students. The accessibility of online learning from any location with an Internet connection results in many online students taking their courses during worktime lunch hours.

Some benefits are particularly important for students. Time-shifting and flexibility make distance education popular with on-campus students, and the expaning use of laptops and wireless hubs no longers restricts the student to a dorm room. For architecture students prone to spend late nights in the studio, an eight o'clock morning class may be difficult to manage. Online students can participate when they are ready and able to do so. One can participate in online learning for a few minutes between face-to-face classes, and log on later to spend a few hours.

Being able to learn in a comfortable environment of one's own making is just as important be being able to learn anytime, anywhere. In the virtual classroom, there are no bad seats. One can eat and drink while "in class," listen to music, and one doesn't even have to be dressed.

Any discussion of introducing distance eduction must include consideration of potential impediments. Frameworks for such an analysis include SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunites, threats) model widely used in business and Tony Bates' ACTIONS model (Bates, 1995, 2000).

Technology. The technology of distance education is not a significant barrier to its implementation. Traditional, non-studio courses can be delivered using the same Internet technologies and learning management systems software that are widely used for other online courses. The principal technological hurdle is in connection with some of the specialized software that architects use, such as photo editing, web development, CAD, rendering and web development software. The institution's software licenses may not extend to providing such software for individual student use, requiring students to purchase and install their own copies; fortunately, there are steep discounts on many of these programs that make them affordable for students).

Adding digital presentation and online components to design courses will necessitate the acquisition of appropriate imaging, display and communications hardware and software, and learning how to use them. In deciding how best to allocate a school's technology budget, the design studio is the one place where it will benefit the gratest number of students. Yee has described in detail the technologies that have been used to conduct international virtual design studios since the infancy of the World Wide Web in the early 1990's. The success of those efforts, using computer technologies that would now be considered primitive (Yee, 2001), makes it clear that the issue is not whether the technology exists to facilitate online collaboration in design, but how to make the most effective use of the tools that are available.

Costs. With most institutions having already established the infrastructure for online learning (computing infrastructure, learning management system, distance education administration, electronic library resources, and student support systems), the principal costs will be the "soft costs" of personnel time to plan and manage the program and to develop many courses. A commonly used standard is to allow a faculty member release time for preparation, equivalent to the amount of time spent in teaching a course for one semester. Digitization of a school's slide library and the cost of subscriptions to online journals and specialized databases are of general benefit to all programs, and should not be regarded as a cost of distance education. However, the cost of audio and videoconferencing equipment and communications for remote design reviews would need to be taken into consideration and balanced against the cost and feasibility of bringing in outside reviewers.

Accreditation. NAAB accreditation should not be a barrier to implementing an online education component to the curriculum, as long as student performance criteria are met. The assigned studio space requirement has been waived for the few schools in which students do the majority of their work off-site and bring it to school for reviews and juries. The NAAB requirements for facilities, library and resources could present a burden for a virtual university (such as the University of Phoenix Online) that sought to offer a "first professional degree" entirely online, but this should not affect any established school.

Student readiness. In the United States, virtually all college students students own or have access to a personal computer, Internet access, and basic computer literacy and communication skills. High-speed/bandwidth connections are increasingly common. While student readiness would be a consideration in a continuing education program for some older members of the profession, it is no longer a significant barrier to online learning for a generation that has been raised in a digital environment.

Leadership and support. A commitment to and support for a distance learning program is required at all levels in order for it to succeed. At the university level, the existence of an online learning program evidences a strong, continuing commitment. The greater challenges will be in obtaining financial, logistical and technical support from the parent institution for faculty training and equipment, and developing a continuing commitment and the necessary support within the school's faculty and administration to plan, implement and maintain a robust and coherent program of distance learning. A critical mass of four or more full-time faculty members teaching core courses, who are willing to make the commitment to teaching online and supported by the administration and student assistants, is necessary for the program to be anything more than an odd collection of occasional online course offerings—a point that few, if any schools appear to have reached. The distance learning program should exist within the context of a larger commitment by the school to the use of Internet and computer technologies as a primary means of communication and method of doing business.

Attitudes. Bringing about attitudinal changes may be the greatest impediment to establishing a distance learning program in an architectural school. The same level of creativity and innovation that characterizes the architect's design work must be applied to the methodology of teaching, accompanied by a high tolerance for failure and a willingness to keep trying. The attitudes of faculty members towards the use of technology, towards their students, and towards their own role in fostering learning and as members of the profession and the larger community, will be challenged by the adoption of a distance education program. A shared vision and a high degree of cooperation and collaboration among faculty is a critical ingredient for success.