Qualitative structural design education in large cohorts of undergraduate architecture students

While constraints imposed by large cohort sizes and lecture-based teaching are often described as preventing an educational focus on quality and individual thinking, this article presents a mixed method teaching approach for quality-oriented structural design education of large cohorts as implemented in a module on structure and construction of the BEng in Architecture programme at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, People's Republic of China. In this approach, lecture-based teaching is extended with open-ended individual and group assignments that emphasise individual qualitative learning. Results from the module show that in large cohorts, structural design education with an emphasis on quality and individual thinking is achievable.