Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal. The views expressed in this Forum article do not necessarily reflect the views of ASCE or the Editorial Board of the journal.

Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal. The views expressed in this Forum article do not necessarily reflect the views of ASCE or the Editorial Board of the journal.

In this paper, the process led by a group of lecturers to get more feedback from students to improve their motivation is presented. The theoretical framework of the research has been the participatory action research. The investigation included self-evaluation of lecturers, feedback from student group interviews, questionnaires, and specific action plans based on students-lecturer consensus. The results revealed gradual improvement, with a more positive attitude by students towards their future learning: weak elements identified at an initial stage (need to increase feedback or to improve student-lecturer relationship) are not perceived mid-course. At the end of the academic year, students expressed their satisfaction for being able to express their views and being identified as proactive actors at improving their learning. Lecturers become guides in the learning process, and students become agents working in close contact with lecturers to optimize their learning process.

Even though construction management is a practice-oriented profession, it is not always easy to cover practical aspects of the content. Construction Management I at the University of Texas at San Antonio is a lecture-based course and includes many project-related administrative topics. Most students who take this course have no previous construction project experience. This type of course is typically instructor-centered, i.e., it is taught with passive learning methods. Recognizing this fact, different strategies were developed every semester to make the lecture more interactive and learner-centered. This study is about a construction-site trip experience including an integrated, collaborative learning exercise covering the request for information (RFI) content of a construction-management course. This content is previously covered in class with a teamwork exercise and is also covered with a teamwork exercise during the construction-site trip with examples of technical problems encountered during the execution of the construction project. To measure the effectiveness of the site trip, a survey was conducted with participating students. The findings indicate that students favored the learning experience. In addition to class, this type of exercise is a good supplementary method for learning. The integration of a collaborative technical exercise during the site trip is the novel portion of this study.

Previous studies have found that nontechnical skills, like, for example, communication, team work, and solving open-ended problems, are abilities that civil engineers must possess to perform their professional duties. However, the traditional teacher-centered methods employed in civil engineering schools do not encourage students to develop these skills. To address this concern, the educational program at the School of Civil Engineering of Ciudad Real in Spain was designed using a project-based learning methodology, which produced satisfactory results. Recently, to meet new requirements coming from the higher education European degrees, this program modified its curriculum. To further improve the program, the Transportation Infrastructure course, which was previously taught using traditional methods, was redesigned within a project-based learning framework and was renamed Transportation Geotechnics and Pavement Engineering. Because the school is still transitioning from the old program to the new program, a survey was conducted to compare and discuss the opinions of two groups of students who completed these subjects during the 2012–2013 academic year. The results of both the survey and the final marks of the respective groups illustrate better performance of project-Based learning methodologies compared with traditional teaching techniques.

The objective of bachelor programs in engineering is the acquisition, over a period of approximately four years, of technical and professional skills that will allow the young graduate to address problems of relative significance and to propose workable solutions. A major step in the integration of knowledge and skills by the future engineer is often a capstone project. In civil engineering, problems of interest should require an investigation from an integrated perspective and take into account a variety of social and management issues. This paper reports on an original concept for a capstone project that was experimented at the Université de Sherbrooke in the Fall 2000 term. In this project, all students of the graduating class had to design complementary components of the same open-ended project. The class was organized as a consortium of five consulting firms, which had to coordinate their design efforts to produce a single, complete, and integrated proposal to the client. A key feature of the project was the implementation of an original coordination approach. The conceptual aspects of this innovative capstone project are presented in the paper. The organizational aspects are discussed in view of the academic constraints and requirements. The paper provides an assessment of the project outcomes. In addition to an evaluation of the educational value of the project from the coordinating professor’s point of view, the paper also presents the opinion of the students, who were invited to revisit this pedagogical experiment after 10 years of professional practice.

Incorporating the concepts of sustainable development in engineering education is becoming a necessity in order to prepare future professionals with the dynamic mindset and broad knowledge needed to effectively and efficiently solve the interdisciplinary challenges of the 21st century. To this end, utilizing the principles of active learning towards sustainable construction education leads to stronger learning outcomes and development for students. The objective is to enhance the undergraduate student skill-set that is required to make them more enabled, aligned, and supported to design, construct, and operate our infrastructure systems. In this paper, the authors provide the associated course development principles grounded in problem-based-learning (PBL) and service-learning (SL) pedagogies, course management strategy, as well as the educational and learning philosophies. To this end, the course PBL activities utilized interrelated and mutually supportive assignments and projects where the assigned problems were not created equally (i.e., varying in complexity and structuredness). Through the evolution of problem-based course activities, the students were engaged in a service-based assignment in relation to the LEED certification process for a new on-campus building. Also, the associated student work was shared with the project developers for potential usage, and resulted in a peer-reviewed journal paper that is forthcoming in the Journal of Management in Engineering. The results and analysis associated with this study were comprised of PBL activity characterization, instructor evaluation of student performance, and student self-reflections of the course. The results suggest that even with increased complexity of PBL activities, students’ performance increased throughout the semester. Although arriving with some resistance, students ultimately took ownership of the entire educational experience and completed a final open-ended, complex, and authentic service learning activity. Through engaging students in discussions and guiding their reflections on scientific material, instructors are regarded as facilitators and collaborators rather than sources of authority. This paper provides an example that could be followed by other engineering faculty in setting and planning big goals for engineering students.

Distance education has gone through rapid expansion over the years. Many Australian universities are pushing the use of distance education in delivering construction education programs. However, the critical success factors (CSFs) in distance learning construction programs (DLCPs) are not fully understood. More importantly, students’ demographic features may affect the selection of distance education technologies. Situation-matching strategies should therefore be taken by universities or institutions with different student cohorts. A survey is adopted in Central Queensland University (CQU) to identify and rank the critical success factors in a DLCP in Australia where there is a significant number of earner-learners and students with low socioeconomic background. The findings suggest that the most important CSFs include access to computers and internet, reliability of web-based learning sites, high relevance and clarity of learning materials and assessment items, the availability of web-based learning sites that can be easily manipulated, and the capability of the instructors to provide well-structured courses. The findings also suggest that students with low socioeconomic background have more rigorous requirements on interface design, instructors’ support, and the integration of practical components into courses. The results provide good guidance of the design and delivery of DLCPs and will be useful for universities and institutions that are seeking to implement the distance mode in construction education.

Exposure to laboratory experiences is valuable for students in all engineering disciplines. Because of spatial constraints or physical limitations, not all engineering students can obtain hands-on involvement with relevant experimental apparatus and laboratory procedures in their curriculum. However, all engineering students should have familiarity with conducting experiments, and collecting and analyzing experimental data. An Internet-enabled experimental apparatus that demonstrates contaminant adsorption to activated carbon was developed. The hardware and software permitted remote students to operate the apparatus by distance through the Internet. Using the Internet, the students were able to collect data for further analysis. The experiment was implemented in an introduction to civil engineering course, primarily consisting of first and second-year civil engineering students with broad civil engineering interests (e.g., structural, geomechanics, environmental). Through appropriate assessments, the experiment was found to significantly facilitate the students’ understanding of adsorption phenomena. The ability to operate remote laboratory tests can augment the educational experience of students who would otherwise not have a laboratory opportunity, such as distance learners and physically challenged students.