Search results

This study aims to define the main characteristics and possibilities of ontological approaches to research in architecture by considering content, methodologies and subject position in this type of research and questions if there is a future for this type of research or not.

The primary data collection method of this research is based on the ethos of the author who has taught research courses for many years. This research has also been questioned through the discussions made within a related PhD course.

Results of this research reveal that the spontaneous ideology of architecture might have influenced the neglection of the ontological approaches in academic research in architecture.

Architecture has an interesting position towards reductionism because architectural thinking has ontological characteristics. The ontological approaches to academic research seems to be more applicable to architecture. However, research in architecture does not necessarily have this ontological character.

The “ontological approach to academic research” covers a larger set of research than the method of ontology, which is used to discuss the categories, limitations in research. Thinking on ontological approaches to research is needed because there is a considerable increase in the use of mixed research methods, which combine qualitative and quantitative research. The second reason for this is the criticisms about the unethical reductionism directed towards contemporary science by philosophers. However, there is no sufficient literature on the ontological approaches to research. This is true also for the academic research in architecture.

Academic libraries have witnessed huge changes due to internal and external factors. Recent evidence shows that there is a lack of interest in process analysis within academic libraries. There is a lot written on the need to change academic libraries but there is little analytical research that investigates processes, in terms of the process architecture. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The modelling tool used is Architecture of Integrated Information Systems (ARIS).

ARIS can provide a process architecture and design for academic libraries that might raise questions later about procedures and some inefficiencies.

Library managers might need to learn new techniques.

There is a lot written on the need to change academic libraries but there is little analytical research that investigates processes, in terms of the process architecture. This research examines business process modelling for academic libraries, focusing on the process architecture, as a way of visualizing, understanding and documenting processes.

Following the positive call for a special issue on Architectural Pedagogies and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the purpose of this overview article is to contextualise reflections on nine selected articles, within recent efforts made by professional organisations, which aspire to blend sustainable development into the collective psyche of both academics and future professionals.

This article adopts four lines of inquiry by capturing key insights on the place of sustainable design knowledge in architectural education validation and accreditation at both national and global scales; presenting analytical narratives on the recent global efforts that embrace excellence in architectural pedagogy through addressing SDGs; elucidating the two knowledge spaces, centred on pedagogy and sustainability, which are strengthened and supported by Archnet-IJAR, and offering reflections on the nine articles published in this special issue that aims at integration of the two knowledge spaces.

Contextualisation and reflective narratives offer insights into current efforts and demonstrate a clear commitment of professional organisations to embed values relevant to SDGs. Efforts of the Education Commission of the International Union of Architects and the UNESCO-UIA Validation Council of Architectural Education appear to have advanced significantly over recent years with a clear prospect for a sustainable future. The nine articles published in this special issue respond clearly to the goal of Quality Education (SDG4), but not all of them have addressed the goals related to Good Health and Well-being (SDG3) and Sustainable Cities and Communities (SDG11), and their place in architectural pedagogy. However, they take a step further to address aspects of climate change, globalisation, sustainable architecture and urbanism, social sustainability, global north/global south dialectics and decolonisation.

The findings offer opportunities to recognise efforts by professional organisations, map key pedagogical experiments into these efforts, while providing lessons learned from best practices aiming to effectively integrate SDGs into architectural pedagogy.

No serious effort has been made to articulate the integration of SDGs into architectural education at the level of research or design studio pedagogical practice. Addressing architectural pedagogies and sustainable development is predicated on the fact that there is very little written or known on integrating SDGs into architectural education and design pedagogy. Understanding, appreciating, and sharing various efforts and approaches to incorporate SDGs into architectural pedagogy is a key step towards a sustainable future.

Construction is a complex process which requires the co‐ordination of and co‐operation between stakeholders. Most construction projects require the skills and services of various built environment disciplines and the effective integration of these skills determines the success of the project. However, built environment students continue to receive discipline‐based education. Construction shapes the built environment; therefore knowledge and understanding, to varying degrees of depth and complexity, of an array of subject areas are one required to suitably equip entrants into the built environment arena. Furthermore, the outdated education system is challenged by academics, built environment practitioners, and media reports. The purpose of this study is to question the suitability of built environment tertiary education in terms of current trends, technologies and practices.

A questionnaire developed from literature related to the diverse content, appropriateness, empowering effect, and delivery methods of built environment education, was used to survey built environment academics and postgraduate students. The questionnaire also aimed at determining the interconnectedness and cohesion between the five disciplines of architecture, quantity surveying, civil engineering, project management, and construction management.

There is a perceived need for both university of technology and university programmes, built environment tertiary education is relatively diverse in terms of content, there is a perceived need for a common first year and common subjects at other levels, and there is a trend towards perpetuation of traditional technologies, practices and systems within built environment education.

Certain subject areas should form an integral part of all built environment tertiary education programmes, in particular construction science and technology, management theory, information technology, and project management. This conclusion and the percentage responses relative to other subjects highlight the inadequacy of architecture and, to a lesser extent, civil engineering tertiary education.

This study intends to review the existing studies on the application of immersive learning technology (ILT) in architecture education field. A systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted on the characteristics and implementation of ILT, research purpose, approach and outcome of research.

The PICO concept (Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome measures) was used to form the research keywords. The Scopus database was searched and supported by supplementary search on Google Scholar, ProQuest, Emerald Insight and Springer Link. Based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 19 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2013 and 2019 were identified.

Virtual reality was found to be the most prevalent ILT applied in architecture education and commonly used as simulation. Most of the studies were applied in year-two architecture study and were mainly implemented for architecture design subject. Very few studies have associated the use of ILT with learning theories, and most of the existing studies have examined the effect of ILT on learning performance. Motivation was found to be the dominant emotional state, and most of the interventions deal with a higher cognitive level.

Only a small number of articles were selected due to the limited number of studies on the subject. Nevertheless, analysis of the selected few has provided valuable insight into the current scenario of the research topic.

This study adds to the existing literature by examining the existing empirical evidence on ILT intervention in the architecture education field. The findings will contribute towards innovating the learning process among architecture students and encouraging the use the ILT as part of architecture education system in higher education institutions.

Technology development quality in architectural design is affected by the quality of the process and factors used to develop it. The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors for effective enhancement (EE) of technologies in design process improvement (DPI).

Major databases have been explored to identify a list of factors affecting technology development in DPI because of the main elements of architecture design education. Then, a survey-based empirical study has been done in two high-rank architecture schools (one in a developing country and one in a developed country), during the years 2015–2018. Data have been collected from analyzing the design process, design reviews, design team viewpoints, researchers' observations and organizations' features about the development of production, conceptualization and communication technologies in DPI initiatives. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches have been utilized to provide deep contextual data.

Comparative analysis of the groups showed that high levels of EE of technologies lead to high levels of DPI, and these are because of the positive performance of conceptualization, communication and production technologies.

Comparing two groups, the category of design process and the factors related to the design stages of ask, imagine and improve approved to be the right factors to use technologies in more effective ways. Efficiency in collecting information and doing research, efficiency in developing solutions, efficiency in communicating results, team processes and organization communications have been rated top most effective factors based upon overall categories.

The aim of this paper is to stimulate further discussion on divergent institutional and academic needs for effective marking processes to evaluate student work in Australian universities. This is in specific response to institutional stated goals and emerging policies under current economic realities. After identifying the three significant areas of marking that must be addressed: content, consistency and cost; the author proposes that the use of the AERO‐dynamic model of marking will reduce academic workloads and provide institutions with an effective marking process to meet corporate budgets.

This conceptual paper is a synthesis of researcher participation and discourse interpretation. It is based on a cynical response to changing realities and resides in the arena of the “Theatre of the Absurd”.

The AERO‐dynamic model of marking was found to be highly cost effective for institutions with large student cohorts and ever diminishing budgets. Critical analysis identified areas of concern in marking consistency and assignment content and recommends specific actions to address these but also identifies that no process will be perfect and that some tradeoffs between cost, consistency and content need to be made. The role of the academic within this marking process is redefined and the implications of this for both institution and individual acknowledged.

This paper offers a starting point for further debate into the widening gap between student expectations on assignment marking and institutional resource allocation and support.

In recent years, there has been a tremendous increase in the number of applicants seeking placements in undergraduate architecture programs. It is important during the selection phase of admission at universities to identify new intakes who possess the capability to succeed. Admission variable (i.e. prior academic achievement) is one of the most important criteria considered during the selection process. This paper aims to investigates the efficacy of using data mining techniques to predict the academic performance of architecture students based on information contained in prior academic achievement.

The input variables, i.e. prior academic achievement, were extracted from students’ academic records. Logistic regression and support vector machine (SVM) are the data mining techniques adopted in this study. The collected data were divided into two parts. The first part was used for training the model, while the other part was used to evaluate the predictive accuracy of the developed models.

The results revealed that SVM model outperformed the logistic regression model in terms of accuracy. Taken together, it is evident that prior academic achievement is a good predictor of academic performance of architecture students.

Although the factors affecting academic performance of students are numerous, the present study focuses on the effect of prior academic achievement on academic performance of architecture students.

The developed SVM model can be used as a decision-making tool for selecting new intakes into the architecture program at Nigerian universities.

Business process modeling has been given great attention due to its crucial role in developing computer-based systems that support (and automate) organizational processes. In information systems, building the right process architecture is vital, since a poor division of organizational processes can lead to complex designs or incoherent structure. Moreover, process architecture acts as a “big picture” of what the organization does, and represents dynamic relationships between the existing processes, which, in turn, helps understand how the organization works (Ould, 2005). The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper discusses the derivation of a process architecture diagram (PAD) using the Riva method in detail, in contrast to the PAD developed using Architecture of Integrated Information Systems (ARIS). The information system selected as an example for this comparative study is in the context of academic libraries, embedding various yet generic library processes.

Organizational process architecture provides a basis for business management, based on specific framework supported by integrated tools and methods (Kozina, 2006). ARIS and Riva process architecture methods can be used to visualize and document organizational processes. Understanding the merits and weaknesses of each method is essential to identify possible areas of application.

The processes selected were generic in most academic libraries not taking into consideration special personalized processes. These can be added though.

Both techniques are feasible and can be used to view and analyze library processes, allowing bridging the gap between theory and practice.

A number of process architecture methods are available, however, few studies focused on assessing these methods, and comparing some of them to find out how easy they are to be used in particular contexts, and whether they can be standardized.

Information-centric networking (ICN) is an innovative paradigm for the future internet architecture. This paper aims to provide a view on how academic video lectures can exploit the ICN paradigm. It discusses the design of academic video lectures over named data networking (NDN) (an ICN architecture) and speculates their future development. To the best of author’s knowledge, a similar study has not been presented.

The paper is a visionary essay that introduces the background, elaborates the basic concepts and presents the author’s views and insights into academic video lectures that exploit the latest development of NDN approach and its applications.

The ICN paradigm is closely related to the levels of automation and large-scale uptake of multimedia applications that provide video lectures. Academic video lectures over NDN have: improved efficiency, better scalability with respect to information/bandwidth demand and better robustness in challenging communication scenarios. A framework of academic video lectures over NDN must take into account various key issues such as naming (name resolution), optimized routing, resource control, congestion control, security and privacy. The size of the network in which academic video lectures are distributed, the content location dynamics and the popularity of the stored video lectures will determine which routing scheme must be selected. If semantic information is included into academic video lectures, the network dynamically may assist video (streaming) lecture service by permitting the network to locate the proper version of the requested video lecture that can be better delivered to e-learners and/or select the appropriate network paths.

The paper helps researchers already working on video lectures in finding a direction for designing and deploying platforms that will provide content-centric academic video lectures.

The paper pioneers the investigation of academic video lecture distribution in ICN and presents an in-depth view to its potentials and research trends.