Knowledge sharing. Testing new strategies of innovative distance learning to foster a sense of class community for undergraduate students.

The current health emergency has intensified the experimentation of distance learning and the search for strategies to increase the involvement of students in training activities and their interaction. This paper aims to show some of those strategies specifically conceived to encourage students cooperating in a cross direction, to provide knowledge sharing and help building a sense of community between first year students of the Bachelor’s Degree in Interior Design of Politecnico di Milano, within the design studio named “Elementi Visivi del Progetto”. This design studio is made up of three integrated didactic modules: interior culture, graphics and visual communication, and production of images with photography. Through these subjects, students learn to recognize the identity of an interior, with particular attention to the perceptive principles, and how to communicate the elements that characterize it. In this learning context, the teachers team introduced the above mentioned strategies to empower the sense of class community through an experimental training activity that was carried out into the two final steps of the design process. The first output was the teamwork project presentation, named Leporello - consisting of a long sheet folded in a sequence of pages, displaying the main aspects of the project - made up of 4 or 5 different presentation techniques (drawings, sketches, photographs, texts...). The second request was to generate an overall document, representing the whole class, made of the combination of all the Leporellos and highlighting the aspects in common between the diverse projects. This activity has been implemented by students through an explorative long tour among the virtual teamwork rooms that teachers set up at the beginning of the design studio on the Microsoft Teams platform, which is the unified communication and collaboration platform which Politecnico chose for online teaching. The teachers team motivated students to discuss about their projects, interact and exchange opinions, with the aim of stimulating them, even from a distance, to share their results and to find design contents in common. The composition generated a horizontal design model, inspired by a crosswords shape that represent the whole design studio activity of ‘Laboratorio di Elementi Visivi 2020’. After the first difficulties encountered in distance learning, students proved to be proactive in finding ways for project debate through peer to peer review, and being able to expand their design and comparing abilities. The positive feedback given by the students prompted the teachers team to plan to increase the interaction between students also in the different phases and didactic modules proposed within the studio in future.