A Review of ‘Modern Building Design’
Welcome to the first in my series of reviews of FutureLearn courses. I joined FutureLearn’s Unlimited subscription service recently but as well as doing their courses for my own education, I’m also looking at the them from the point of view of an EFL teacher. Are these courses suitable for use in the EFL classroom? Join me as I look to find out!
Watch a video review of this course on my YouTube channel, where you can also follow my adventures with FutureLearn. If you’re an EFL teacher, feel free to ask me an EFL Question on my Facebook page, and I’ll make a video response to it.
Summary of the Course
The course examined modern building practices, with a very clear focus on the environmental impact of building design. The first week looked at the idea that buildings might be evil, an interesting choice of words but one that makes sense the more the idea is examined. While the focus of many is on carbon-producing vehicles, climate change is really exacerbated by the construction industry — both when buildings are made and when they are used. The second week turned our attention to modern materials and their use in construction — we looked, for instance, at how fabric mouldings can be used to make better, more efficient, concrete structures — and in the third week we were introduced to BIM, or Building Information Modelling.
Level of Difficulty
There was a lot to digest on this course, and a lot to take in all at once. I found it quite challenging in places, as it was clear that you were expected to have at least a bit of a background in either architecture or civil engineering. However, resources were provided throughout the course to help with comprehension, and it was always possible to ask questions on the discussion board in the hope that others might leap to your assistance.
3 Things I Learned
I’ve known what ‘brise soleil’ was for a long time — you see it on glass buildings, and usually it’s a wooden construction arranged in slats — but I didn’t know the technical name, and I also didn’t appreciate what a significant effect it can have on a building and the energy it uses.
In modern years the average temperature at which buildings are kept has risen slightly — when I was at school, room temperature was assumed to be 20 degrees Celsius, but the average is now more like 22. I really liked the moment the lecturer suggested that, when we’re a little cool in our home, we should put on a jumper rather than turn on the heating.
I had no idea the environmental impact of poor insulation in houses was so huge. But I expected modern buildings to be better than they are — it turns out that today’s buildings are often no more energy efficient than those built in the Victorian period.
For EFL Teachers — Is this teachable?
Yes, but it will require motivated, relatively high-level students if you want to do the course justice. Sustaining effort across the three weeks might prove an unreasonable challenge, and so this might be a better course to dip in and out of. There’s some great stuff in here for students to look at and be exposed to, but sometimes the presentation lacks clarity.
Presentation — Videos, Articles, Sequencing
The biggest issues I had with the course had to do with presentation. The videos were generally good, but they were very long, and sometimes involved presenters who were clearly uncomfortable in front of the camera. They read their lines too quickly and in a flat voice, and would not be good models for EFL students to learn from. I think that videos on FutureLearn should be kept below three minutes in length, because otherwise they will contain too much content for any student to manage.
The articles were often problematic as well. They could have done with more editing — some of the sentences were particularly clunky, and I noticed a few errors here and there. Compared with other courses — which had clearly been through a few focus-group readings, perhaps even with non-native speakers to check comprehensibility — the ease with which I moved through the text was not what it should have been.
And finally, the sequencing. The first two weeks provided a lot of fascinating content, even though you sometimes had to work a bit to get at it. The third week was a disappointment, and I saw many comments to that effect in the discussion boards. The topic of Building Information Management certainly didn’t strike a chord in the way that Buildings Are Evil did! It also became clear that the amount of content was insufficient to last the whole week, and some of the articles here felt more like an advertisement for Bath University. I don’t mind that too much — many of my students are approaching university age, and these sections would be relevant to them — but clearly others had a different opinion.
Interactivity — Discussion Boards, Quizzes
Discussion was quite lively, especially in the first two weeks. It dwindled in the third week, as you might expect. The quizzes to check students’ comprehension were quite good, but in the first week there was an over-reliance on checklist questions where you ended up ticking every box in the question to get the right answer. A touch more variation here would have helped significantly.
My Grade: 4 Stars
I enjoyed the majority of this course, and I do feel that I learned something of value as I worked through the material. Perhaps if it had been a two-week course (and the third week had been completely cut) I might have been tempted to award this the full four stars.
EFL Grade and CEFR Level: 3 Stars. C2 Level.
I don’t think that this course was quite good enough to be used in the EFL classroom without either being adapted or chopped up into more manageable parts. Since the writing in the articles wasn’t always that good, I would expect students with anything lower than about C2 level of English to struggle a bit. Having said that, with the right support there would definitely be something here for students interested in architecture and civil engineering to really sink their teeth into — hence the award of three stars.
