An Evaluation of an Online Collaborative Course Aydin Oztoprak Department of Industrial Design – BILTIR / UTEST Product Usability Unit Faculty of Architecture - Middle East Technical University 06531 Ankara Turkey oztoprak@metu.edu.tr Cigdem Erbug Department of Industrial Design – BILTIR / UTEST Product Usability Unit Faculty of Architecture - Middle East Technical University 06531 Ankara Turkey erbug@metu.edu.tr Abstract This paper aims to evaluate the utilization of online collaboration environments in design education in order to conduct an efficient and effective virtual design studio course. Evaluation is based on an international course with the involvement of undergraduate design students of Middle East Technical University (Turkey) and Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands). The course was conducted in 2003-2004 Fall Semester and its duration was twelve weeks. Apart from the last three weeks, nine weeks of the course were conducted with the participation of both Universities. The well-established conventions of traditional design education; the concept generation phase of design process; peer learning in design studio and design juries are evaluated and compared with their application in Collaborative Virtual Design Environment, called InfoBase. 1 Introduction In the recent years, the integration of information and communication technologies (ICT) to design education was enabled distant participants to attend to the same design studio courses, and with the utilization of ICT for distant design teaching, the well-established conventions of traditional industrial design education started to be transformed. The transformation from traditional tools to ICT created new opportunities as well as new problems in design education. The complexity of design tasks and processes in contemporary design education and profession is the key motivation of collaborative virtual design environments (CVDEs). With the help of CVDEs, despite the fact that designers are geographically distributed, they are able to collaborate and interact seamlessly with each other as if they are in the same room. In addition, consultation to experts of other disciplines during design process can be achieved in a feasible way by utilizing information technologies. In professional life, the pressure on the designer to design the whole life cycle of the product, from concept to end user testing, is increased with the arrival of new technologies in designing, presenting and testing phases. The designer is now asked to be able to cope with the technology as well as the design. Moreover, with the communication and collaboration technologies, designers are able to reach expertise on a specific subject within a matter of seconds. It is obvious that to satisfy the increasing requirements of design profession, design education has to conform to the new developments. The main motivation to initiate CVDEs is to provide the design student with the necessary tools, techniques and skills for professional life. Other motivations of CVDEs might be listed as follows: • Providing a medium for collaboration with distant international partners. It is relatively easy to establish an international studio with CVDE. Students are able to interact in a foreign environment and gain different design perspectives. • Exposing students to different cultures and schools of design. Many students enroll in exchange programs to learn about different cultures and enrich their educational experience. With CVDEs that is, to some extent, more cost effective and easy to establish (Dave & Danahy 2000, Laiserin 2002). • Preparing design students for a demanding profession by teaching both computer aided design (CAD) and information and communication technologies (ICT) (Cheng, 2000). • Improving students’ design skills as well as collaboration skills (Cheng 2000, Laiserin 2002, Zimring, Khan, Craig, Haq & Guzdial 2001 and Dave & Danahy 2000).