Preparing Civil Engineers for International Collaboration in Construction Management
Publication: Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice
Volume 137, Issue 3
Abstract
Economic globalization is increasingly affecting both the construction industry and academia. It is changing the traditional roles of civil engineers and construction managers. Cross-cultural collaboration and communication skills, multinational team management skills, the ability to overcome the social challenges of geographically distributed teams, and familiarity with construction materials, standards, and methods of foreign countries are vital for modern construction professionals. However, the traditional skills and education style of engineers and construction managers do not equip them to successfully deal with such issues. This paper describes the experiences of a university course International Collaborative Construction Management that was developed to educate the next generation of civil engineers to be more internationally savvy. Throughout the three years that the course has been conducted to date, students in Turkey, the United States, Israel, and Brazil were grouped in multinational teams. They collaborated to develop construction schedules, cost estimates, risk assessment plans and response strategies and to prepare bid documents for actual construction projects. Within the context of this course, students were introduced to the different challenges of cross-cultural collaboration and improved their technical/managerial skills through direct involvement in hands-on experiences.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
References
Altbach, P. G., and Knight, J. (2007). “The internationalization of higher education: Motivations and realities.” J. Stud. Int. Educ., 11(3–4), 290–305.
Bradner, E., and Mark, G. (2002). “Why distance matters: Effects on cooperation, persuasion, and deception.” Proc., ACM Conf. on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW, ACM, New York, 226–235.
Brett, J., Behfar, K., and Kern, M. C. (2006). “Managing multicultural teams.” Harvard Business Review, Boston, 84–91.
Cheah, C. Y. J., Chen, P. H., and Kiong Ting, S. (2005). “Globalization challenges, legacies, and civil engineering curriculum reform.” J. Prof. Issues Eng. Educ. Pract., 131(2), 105–110.
Devon, R., Saintive, D., Hager, W., Nowé, M., and Sathianathan, D. (1998). “Alliance by design: An international student collaboration.” Proc., ASEE Annual Conference, Seattle, WA.
Diamant, E. I., Fussell, S. R., and Lo, F. L. (2008). “Where did we turn wrong? Unpacking the effects of culture and technology on attributions of team performance.”Proc., ACM Conf. on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW, ACM, New York, 383–392.
Doerry, E., Doerry, K., and Bero, B. (2003). “The global engineering college: Exploring a new model for engineering education in a global economy.” Proc., 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conf. and Exposition, Session 1279, Nashville, TN.
Friedman, T. L. (2005). The world is flat; A brief history of the 21st century, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York.
Fruchter, R. (1998). “Internet-based web-mediated collaborative design and learning environment.” Artificial Intelligence in Structural Engineering, Information Technology for Design, Collaboration, Maintenance, and Monitoring, Springer, London.
Fruchter, R. (1999). “A/E/C Teamwork: A collaborative design and learning space.” J. Comput. Civ. Eng., 13(4), 261–269.
Fruchter, R. (2001). “Dimensions of teamwork education.” Int. J. Eng. Educ., 17(4, 5), 426–430.
Hussein, K., and Peña-Mora, F. (1999). “Frameworks for interaction support in distributed learning environments.” J. Comput. Civ. Eng., 13(4), 291–302.
Kalay, Y. E. (2001). “Enhancing multi-disciplinary collaboration through semantically rich representation.” Autom. Constr., 10, 741–755.
Last, M. Z., Almstrum, V. L., Daniels, M., Erickson, C., and Klein, B. (2000). “An international student/faculty collaboration: The Runestone project.” Proc., ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, ITiCSE, ACM, New York, 128–131.
Last, M. Z., Daniels, M., Hause, M. L., and Woodroffe, M. R. (2002). “Learning from students: Continuous improvement in international collaboration.” Proc., ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, ITiCSE, ACM, New York, 136–140.
Littrell, L. N., and Salas, E. (2005). “A review of cross-cultural training: Best practices, guidelines, and research needs.” Hum. Resource Dev. Rev., 4(3), 305–334.
Mark, G., Abrams, S., and Nassif, N. (2003). “Group-to-group distance collaboration: Examining the space between.” Proc., 8th European Conf. on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work , Kluwer, Dordrecht, Netherlands, 14–18.
Nachmia, R., Mioduse, D., Oren, A., and Ram, J. (2000). “Web-supported emergent-collaboration in higher education courses.” International Forum of Educational Technology and Society, Athabasca, Alberta, Canada, 94–104.
O’Brien, W., Soibelman, L., and Elvin, G. (2003). “Collaborative design processes: An active- and reflective-learning course in multidisciplinary collaboration.” J. Constr. Educ., 8(2), 78–93.
Peña-mora, F., Vadhavkar, S., and Aziz, Z. (2009). “Technology strengths for globally dispersed construction teams.” J. Inf. Technol. Constr., 14, 70–80.
Quinones, P. A., Fussell, S. R., Soibelman, L., and Akinci, B. (2009). “Bridging the gap: Discovering mental models in globally collaborative contexts.” Proc., 2009 International Workshop on Intercultural Collaboration, 101–110.
Simoff, S. J., and Maher, M. L. (1997). “Design education via web-based virtual environments.” Proc. 4th ASCE Congress of Computing in Civil Engineering, ASCE, New York, 418–425.
Steele, J. L., and Murray, M. A. P. (2000). “Constructing the team—A multicultural experience.” Proc., Chartered Institute of Building, Ascot, Berkshire, UK.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Copyright
© 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Nov 12, 2009
Accepted: Jul 29, 2010
Published online: Aug 3, 2010
Published in print: Jul 1, 2011
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.