<p> Practicing architects and architectural educators have called for better writing by architecture graduates; however, there appears to be a gap in published empirical studies on instructional designs that address the problem of developing student architects&rsquo; writing fluency. Writing well is an especially challenging process for architecture students in design studios because learners must transform the concepts in their visual metaphors, design spaces, and physical models into written language. The study investigated whether architecture students in the treatment group showed greater writing fluency and critical thinking after using sketching as a metacognitive process than did the control group that used words in an identical online lesson. Fifty-six architecture design studio students participated in the quasi-experimental online intervention designed to help students describe their design projects in writing. Student papers following the online sketching intervention were scored using <i> The Cognitive Level and Quality Writing Assessment, Critical Thinking Rubric. </i> Although the one-way ANOVA analysis of mean scores on students&rsquo; papers showed no statistical difference between the treatment group, which used sketching, and the control group, which used words, sketching stimulated students in the treatment group to write lengthy posts critiquing each other&rsquo;s sketches. The finding suggests that online instruction using sketching as a metacognitive scaffolding tool should be further explored as a strategy to engage architecture students in writing practice.</p>

A major challenge for Information Technology (IT) programs is that the rapid pace of evolution of computing technology leads to frequent redesign of IT courses. The problem is exacerbated by several factors. Firstly, the changing technology is the subject matter of the discipline and is also frequently used to support instruction; secondly, this discipline has only been formalized as a four-year university program within recent years and there is a lack of established textbooks and curriculum models; finally, updating courses is seldom rewarded in a higher education system that favors research and teaching for promotion and tenure. Thus, continuously updating their courses place a significant burden on the faculty. A case study approach was used to describe and explain the change processes in updating IT courses. Several faculty members at two institutions were interviewed and course changes were identified and analyzed. The analysis revealed a set of recurrent themes in change processes. An instructional design architecture approach also revealed a set of design domains representing the structure of the change processes. The design domains were analyzed in terms of the design decisions they represented, and also in terms of structures, functions and activities, which are related to Structures-Behaviors-Functions (SBF) analysis. The design domains model helped to explain both negative and positive outcomes that were observed in the data. When design efforts impact multiple domains the design is likely to be more difficult. Understanding the design domain architecture will assist future designers in this discipline.