Video Presentation Assignments in Civil Engineering Courses during the COVID-19 Virtual Period and Beyond

This paper’s objective is to document the incorporation of video technology with associated personality assessments into an undergraduate civil engineering curriculum for giving presentations. In 2020, video assignments were implemented into a laboratory that teaches stabilized soil, aggregates, concrete, and asphalt principles. This same laboratory has, for several years, required students to present to a panel of practitioners on open-ended topics based in the area of their laboratory experiments. A large practitioner and alumni survey documented the successfulness of these panels, which allow no electronics to be used, but also documented some items that technology based presentation assignments could improve. This paper summarizes the panel exercises and associated survey findings, and thereafter, describes the implementation of video presentations with associated personality assessments. The research question was whether video presentation assignments were useful in conjunction with the proven in-person practitioner panels toward improved student presentation skills. The collective findings of this paper support this laboratory incorporating video presentations, especially given the diversity in personalities identified during data collection.