ETH Innovedum

Innovedum is a project promoted by ETH to improve and develop innovative methods for didactic purposes. We are working to reshape our educational methods to meet evolving students’ needs, the state of the art in technology and to promote a wider and deeper interest in the topics of our research beyond the classroom desks.

We pursue the creation of a dynamic web platform with a collection of building physics fundamentals, where the learners can access information 24-hours, learn theory and practice in the competence field both autonomously and with the support of the teachers during the lectures, and develop opinions and interrogations to be discussed during the lecture time.

INTO Building Physics (INteractive Teaching Online) is a dynamic web platform collecting fundamentals for the study of Building Physics, in form of theoretical background information, case studies and materials database, with interactive simulation modules and web-based apps, through which students can learn theory and practice in the competence field, while actively contributing to its content.

We strive to involve students as much as possible in the educational process, and aim to promote their collaboration. They can actively cooperate with us to improve the content of our project as reviewers, proposing projects and exercises, actively commenting on hot topics and co-working with fellows to find solutions to problems. Encouraging critical thinking is our main goal.

The objective of the project is to provide a platform that will induce students to be involved in a structured learning process, to develop analytical abilities and problem-solving skills as required to tackle a building project, to understand the behavior of building envelopes under environmental loads and to master the design of building envelope solutions, from the point of view of building physics. Within this learning environment, students will be involved in a learning path that comprises the theoretical studies, enriched by case studies and exercises, supported by tutorials and forums, and reaching the project phase.

INTO Building Physics (INteractive Teaching Online) features:

• e-Lessons, about building physics topics, rich in didactic content and reference to external sources, websites and learning resources for the deepening of the subject. A special effort is made to animate the basic concepts of heat and mass transport specially its highly nonlinear, time-dependent and coupled behavior aspects by simulation of different fundamental building physics problems.
  Materials display a great variety of heat and mass (vapor, air, water) transport and capacity characteristics. Students will be active in material characterization through e-labs, video and simulations of experiments which results and data will be interpreted and analysed by students.
• A repository of case studies that instructs the users about possibilities to reach objectives of optimization, improvement of the building elements and harmonization of the constructive solutions with the building design objectives.
• A series of proposed projects, through which the learner can choose to handle a specific problem, to verify the knowledge acquired on a generic topic, to deepen the knowledge about a specific physical parameter or phenomenon, with the appropriate series of e-support modules.

In a second stage, this will be further extended by:

• Tutorials that digitize the learning phase and allow teachers to virtually support the student’s guidance on the applications and tools that will be used in the problem-solving phase.
• Forums, that will enhance the collaborative problem-solving.