This is a continuing series of quarterly articles on lessons learned and best practices in civil engineering education. The intent of the series is to reinforce good practices, describe new or developing practices, and provide a forum for what works well and what does not. It is hoped that this series will be an important quarterly read for all civil engineering educators and all those interested in what’s going on in civil engineering education today. Authors and topics will vary from issue to issue. Contact the associate editor, Mark Evans, if you wish to contribute to an upcoming issue.

Two structural engineering courses were taught using distance-learning technology. One course was a graduate level, steel design course and the other was an undergraduate, elective, timber design course. Two-way live video and audio connections linked classrooms at San Jose State University and San Francisco State University. The interaction between student and teacher is discussed. These courses were the first time the California State University system offered students academic credit at either of two universities for a course taught via distance education from a single location. The challenges of teaching engineering design concepts via distance learning are discussed. Assessment of the teaching method was performed using student surveys and review of student grades. The assessment survey revealed that the students’ overall impression was positive. Grades received by the students at the Remote Site were lower than those at the Home Site, but this discrepancy may not have been a result of the distance-learning environment.

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology has been and still is encouraging different ways of integrating design content of individual courses for students to get a meaningful design experience. In response to this emphasis on design integration, a capstone course was instituted 10 years ago in the Civil Engineering and Construction Department of North Dakota State University. This course has successfully evolved over the years. Initially, artificial projects were constructed for the course. Recently, real-life projects for the course are carefully selected from the community. Faculty members expend considerable time in seeking suitable community-based projects for the course. In this setting, students have plenty of opportunity to interact with clients and present their results to the community. The use of community-based projects in the capstone course is discussed in this paper. Overall, students and faculty are satisfied with the experience.

This paper describes construction management teaching for the Master of Engineering in civil engineering course at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom. This course is a 5-yr undergraduate degree accredited by the Institution of Civil Engineers for membership in the Institution subject to graduates satisfying the appropriate postgraduate training objectives. Construction management teaching takes place in the third, fourth, and fifth years of the degree and is structured to make effective use of both traditional and problem-based learning teaching methods. Examples are given of two problem-based learning courses used in the fourth and fifth year of the degree course. Both are based on complex construction projects and provide students with the opportunity to apply and synthesis knowledge gained on the traditionally taught third year course. Formal feedback from students and informal feedback from local industry suggests that the courses are meeting their overall objective of producing graduates with relevant knowledge and skills in construction management.

Governments around the world are seeking to transfer their traditional responsibility for research and development to the private sector. This paper investigates the factors that will impede the effectiveness of privately funded research and development in the construction industry. It concludes that the construction industry is skeptical of the process and ill-equipped to undertake it. Recommendations are made to help private firms adapt to their new role and benefit from it. These relate to issues of strategy, organizational culture, procurement, contractual practices, and interorganizational alliances.

Although performance-based design, procurement, and construction management are now spreading rapidly in the building construction field, full-fledged study of the method for public works has barely begun. At this time, therefore, the concept expressed by the term “performance-based design” (which in this article, for simplicity, will include procurement and construction management) varies from person to person. This article is a basic study of the concepts of performance-based standards, performance-based standardization, and performance-based ordering, which are all necessary to introduce the performance-based design approach into the civil engineering field. It is proposed that performance-based design be defined in terms of two conditions: attainment level of objective of use, and degree of freedom. The article introduces the bottom-up and top-down methods as basic performance standardization methodologies.

TELD stands for “Teaching by Examples and Learning by Doing.” It unifies what have been widely known as case method (CM), problem-based learning (PBL), and project-based learning (PBL) in business, medical, and engineering education, respectively. Two key premises of successful TELD are student participation and collaboration. It is usually resource intensive to accomplish these two premises. The number of teachers/tutors required to facilitate seminars and workshops within small groups is obviously greater than that to give formal lectures to large classes. This requirement restricts the adoption of the TELD method in educational establishments where resources are increasingly stretched already. The TELD courseware engine has been developed with an intention to overcome this limitation. A variety of facilities are provided for the groups and teams to plan their learning activities, to indicate the roles and responsibilities of team members, and to indicate when and what individual members should do and how they should integrate their findings through teamwork in the form of workshops or meetings. This paper discusses and explains these online TELD facilities for enabling student involvement and collaboration.

Traditionally recognized construction professionals such as architects, engineers, and surveyors occupy segregated roles in the construction industry. With the rapidly growing complexity and ever increasing sophistication in project procurement and construction, new disciplines have been added to the traditional construction professions. The characteristics and the roles of the different disciplines in the construction industry are becoming less clear-cut. Specialism within the different disciplines and the working relationship among them are also not easily defined. Transprofessional practice among the several disciplines of construction professionals is commonplace. The skills needed by each discipline and the education structure required to develop those skills cannot be usefully examined on a discipline-by-discipline basis. This paper, based on a research study carried out with a questionnaire survey, aims to investigate these phenomena in professional practices within the construction industry and to develop cogent and sustainable directions for the education of construction professionals in the new millennium. Results from the study suggest that the demands of a transprofessional discipline practice call for construction professionals to critically reexamine their professional skills and realistically evaluate the professional demands made on them by the ever-increasing complexity and technological sophistication in construction and project procurement. The work concludes that the curricula for educating aspiring construction professionals should embrace a multidisciplinary and an integrative-professional approach. Such an approach should be implemented in curricula designed for undergraduates and for the continuing professional education of practitioners.