BIM Education: Implementing and Reviewing "OpeBIM"—BIM for Teachers

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is considered as a common language in construction industry projects today. It is rapidly being acknowledged as a driver for change on a global scale. The perceived benefits of BIM by the early adopters and various research indicate that collaborative BIM approaches help in delivering projects with reduced time, lower cost, higher quality, and greater customer satisfaction. Recent government uptakes and demands for fully collaborative BIM, as a requirement in different countries, have resulted in a strong interest towards BIM adoption and its uses, creating a huge demand of BIM competent workforce. Thus, there is an accelerated need for upskilling the industry practitioners and educating the future engineers. However, there is a major challenge for academic organizations to embrace BIM in their curricula for educating the future professionals due to lack of skilled BIM educators. Engineering education is still often based on drafting, since most teachers are experts in 2D or 3D modeling, and only few in BIM. The present lack of skilled BIM educators calls for educating the educators and, thus, becoming acquainted with the BIM processes, concepts and technologies. The present paper presents the current state and strategies of BIM academic integration in the School of Civil Engineering and Building Services (SCEBS) of Metropolia University of Applied Sciences, Finland. It describes both an initiation and the results derived from "OpeBIM" (BIM for teachers) implemented to educate the educators. The paper collects the feedback and recommendations provided by the participating educators.