No abstract

No abstract

One of the requirements for interior design students by the Council for Interior Design Accreditation is to be "prepared to work in a variety of contexts as well as across geographic, political, social, environmental, cultural, and economic conditions." To help with this preparation, faculty partners from two institutions-the University of Minnesota Interior Design program and the Obafemi Awolowo University Architecture program in Nigeria-created unique learning experiences for their students using the collaborative online international learning (COIL) framework. The main goal of this teaching methodology is to develop students' cross-cultural competence by linking university classes in different countries. Two COIL projects were chosen to help students practice solving design problems while responding to specific sociocultural contexts. Students from both countries benefited from this learning experience. Findings from students' reflections after the experiences indicated deeper intercultural sensitivity in their design solutions and appreciation of technology and collaborative learning. Overall the COIL framework strengthened the integration of multicultural learning experiences in both settings.

Effective teaching is a valuable skill that is hard to learn and understand by just simply observing someone teach. One of the ways to gain better insight into how this skill is being developed is to explore teachers' cognitive processes. Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) methodology developed to study the cognition of experts performing challenging tasks can be a useful tool to gain this insight. This paper will review the underlying theoretical assumptions of this methodology and suggest how one could apply CTA to educational research.

No abstract