COLLABORATIVE E-LEARNING IN ENGINEERING AND ARCHITECTURE: INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS FOR KNOWLEDGE SHARING IN ON-LINE DESIGN LABORATORIES.

From 2000-2004 the activity of the research group working at the Faculty of Architecture of Venice and its associates focused on the construction and the experimentation of an elearning system based on the idea of a “virtual atelier” intended to be used both as a didactic environment (virtual class) and as a teacher-student dialogue tool able to check the designs developed by the students in the virtual laboratory. Since 2001 the “TDraw” system, installed on a IUAV (University of Venice, Faculty of Architecture) server, has been used by about 300 students from a number of training Courses of different academic fields. From this experience it is possible to affirm that in a didactic system (like this proposed) formed by one or more virtual laboratories, the practice of the teaching can provide a universe of notions which grows quickly during the progressive utilization of the system. It is a precious whole of information, dense and heterogeneous, potentially separable into individual learning objects which can be taken from the context where they have been utilized. Their didactic value, however, increases if linked and related to other learning objects (for example those which make up the on-line lessons of the Courses). For this reason the “TDraw” laboratory method needs to be supported by a parallel system that is able to transform it from a pure tool of communication into a more complex system of semantic examining of the data in order to have an automatic acquisition of the information, as well as to be able to suggest solutions already experimented to problems already dealt with; in this way we shall avoid losing the abundant knowledge produced in the atelier activity. In this background and with this aims, after four years of experimentation, the IUAV research group is now improving the system establishing some supervisory functionality of the operations aimed at index and classify the atelier’s experiences, toward a system updated in real time and open to self-learning perspectives: the new “T-Labs” system. The main objective is to combine the previous experiences in an integrated tool (“TLabs”) able to link and relate the e-learning system, the whole of the notions grown in the