Cost and schedule planning and control are two of the most important management functions in the construction industry. Major research efforts are focused on developing procedures for improving the effectiveness of these functions. As a result, researchers are concerned with the quality, integrity, and timeliness of data that flows through such planning and control systems. A number of data models have been proposed to integrate cost and schedule control functions because such integration is viewed as the solution to the many problems facing the management of construction projects today. This paper provides an overview of cost and schedule control, and discusses how these research findings were incorporated in the construction courses offered at the Construction Division of the Department of Civil Engineering and Construction at North Dakota State University.

The education of future civil engineers is incomplete without an appreciation of the men who created the profession of civil engineering in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This paper is a “history module” designed to introduce the history and heritage of civil engineering into existing course work. The fourth in a series, this module traces our understanding of column behavior and the development of a range of equations used to analyze and design columns of various lengths and materials. It begins in the time of Euler and has no end, since engineers have not yet adopted a single equation that covers all lengths and materials. The first three modules dealt with the development of the truss, the Manning formula, and the flexure formula. It is my hope that additional modules will be written and packaged by ASCE for distribution to engineering faculty around the country.

An interactive, multimedia-based set of computer modules has been created for use in Probability and Statistics for Civil Engineers—an undergraduate course. The modules comprise a new laboratory that was implemented for the first time during the Fall 1997 semester. To determine the effectiveness of the new laboratory, evaluation forms, direct observations of students' activities and behaviors, transcriptions from interviews with six students, and class grades were collected throughout the semester. Preliminary assessment of the data collected thus far indicates five main lessons about the implementation and effectiveness of the new laboratory: (1) implementation logistics can get in the way of learning; (2) the control group negatively impacted the evaluation process; (3) students' final course grades were not influenced by the laboratory, but their attitudes were; (4) the amount of effort put into the laboratory by the students affects how much students benefit from the lab; and (5) the laboratory helped bridge the gap between the classroom and the real world.

Increasingly in our integrated global economy, civil engineers are being assigned as team members in multinational consortia. Trying to work effectively in a cross-cultural setting is stressful and potentially debilitating; hence, care must be taken to select team members capable of adapting successfully to cultural change. Various predictors of success are provided to assist North American firms in selecting engineers and their families for international assignments. In addition, a number of steps are suggested to ease their transition into the multinational team and adaptation to the host country. Civil engineering programs at universities and professional development provided by technical societies can contribute to improved multinational consortia by “internationalizing” their offerings. This step reduces ethnocentrism and promotes a deeper respect for the needs and approaches used by engineers from other cultures.

The profession of civil engineering needs graduates with many technical and generic skills. A program of peer instruction and peer mentoring within courses taken by first-year students at Queensland University of Technology in Australia builds networks between junior and senior students, leading to a culture of collaboration and teamwork and a learning environment more akin to that in which professional engineers find themselves. Among the benefits of this program are high student satisfaction, opportunities for development of leadership and organizational skills, and dramatically improved academic results.