Remotely Muti-Collaboration for the Online Teaching of Architectural Design: A Pilot Study Based on a Distributed Version Control Solution

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the use of online meeting platforms has been effective in ensuring orderly teaching on campus and has demonstrated positive value. However, huge gap existed in online teaching and learning on architecture curricula, where spatial analysis and drawing analysis are the core elements of teaching. The existing online teaching method has shown obvious inappropriateness in online teaching and learning on architecture curricula. In this regard, our team proposes a solution for multiparty remote collaboration in architecture teaching based on the principle of distributed version control system with the reference of multiparty remote collaboration of software engineers. In the scheme advancement stage within the design group, each student can make simultaneous modifications to the same design scheme document and be submitted to the shared design project with additional information marking the modifier and modification time. In the program teaching and research stage, different design improvement solutions are displayed simultaneously through the online platform, and the teacher explains and discusses within the group to finally determine the rejection or adoption of design modifications, thus realizing real-time updates and efficient communication of the program design. At this stage, the distributed version control program represented by Git mostly uses row data as the data unit for parsing, which is not suitable for version control of large binary files. For the future, how to optimize and improve the distributed version control from the characteristics of architecture and urban planning professional teaching is an important issue to improve the efficiency of multiparty remote collaboration.