Creating a visual-collaborative learning environment for real estate education – an experiment on a cross-city and inter-disciplinary interactive discussion platform for real estate students in Hong Kong

Real estate education is a multi-disciplinary subject that requires students to have an all-round training and knowledge in such core areas as economic and finance, urban planning and urbanization studies, public policy, law as well as construction technology. These subject areas are dynamic in the sense that they keep evolving with changes in socio-economic as well as technological variables in the society. In addition, while real estate development itself is a geographically fixed commodity which implies local knowledge and regulations dominate the outcome, real estate analysis can be a much more global issue when local developers and investors desire to make an oversea investment decision to diversify investment risk. In such case, the ability for students to understand the intertwined relationship between the general principles of real estate development as well as actual market structures in other places becomes imperative. This problem-based learning ability can be enhanced with a pedagogical approach that injects training in self-initiated research, skillful communication technique and the ability to understand and analyse different socio-economic environments. In this paper, we will illustrate how an online discussion platform for students helps create a visual collaborative learning environment that enhances the learning outcomes of real estate education in a studio-discussion format, which transcends the physical constraints of arranging face-to-face meetings among students from different but related programmes. More importantly, real estate education that can prepare students with a more inter-disciplinary and internationalized basis of knowledge will be able to attract good students who aim at increasing their competitiveness in the global job market. By using the discussion forum based on the interactive environment created by Realtimeboard.com, this paper shows that students from different disciplines and cities can carry out real-time discussions on issues pertaining to urban development without the need to physically meet. The outcomes of our experiment shows that online collaborative learning platform can serve to underpin the pedagogical outcomes of real estate education in a cost-effective manner that both students and teaching staff benefit.