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.

Sustainability is an important component of engineering design and construction; however, recent research has shown that engineering education remains inefficient in teaching students basic principles of sustainable development. This research documents 2 years of using an online tool to promote learning of sustainability principles in construction education. Autodesk’s Building Performance Analysis (BPA) online modules were assigned in a sustainable construction class. Over the course of two semesters, students were required to complete tutorials and earn the BPA Certificate. Student feedback and assessments were collected after each module, as well as after final group presentations. Autodesk has stated that BPA online coursework “provides a high-level understanding of the issues involved in sustainable, high-performance building design.” Overall, students concurred that the modules enhanced their learning experience both in regard to specific course material and sustainable building principles, which include topics related to energy, climate, solar, wind, daylight, and whole building analysis. Specifically, findings suggest that the online training material enhanced sustainable competencies in both systems thinking and change-agents skills. Opinions regarding the effectiveness of BPA training and delivery were compared to those of students who completed another online training to earn Procore’s Fundamentals Certificate. The comparison suggests that Autodesk’s BPA has more impact on student learning outcomes than Procore’s program. However, students reported that they are more likely to use Procore’s project management concepts and software in industry.

The aim of this work was to examine the use of the Model of Domain Learning (MDL) framework to determine the level of students’ ethics learning during their progress in the engineering curriculum, considering three constructs through which learning is gained: knowledge, strategic processing, and interest. The MDL has been validated and used in different fields to predict the stages of student development and its relation to important constructs contributing to learning. This study was conducted to demonstrate that the MDL framework is effective in assessing ethics learning in engineering education. For this purpose, a questionnaire was developed based on the MDL framework and administered to 940 students from freshmen to seniors. The questionnaire consisted of 31 items divided into three sets of questions: (1) demographics, (2) multiple choices to measure knowledge and strategic processing, and (3) Likert scale to measure students’ interest level in ethics. The results revealed that there is a progressive increment in knowledge and strategic processing as students advance in their studies, while the level of interest remains statistically the same, and a significant correlation between knowledge and strategic processing in the development of ethical awareness and reasoning in engineering students. Consequently, the assessment instrument based on the MDL framework can be used to effectively measure the ethics learning in engineering education in a progressive form, taking into consideration the components and stages of learning.

Educators and practitioners have come to the consensus that building information modeling (BIM) has radically transformed how the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry practices and operates. The move from using traditional drafting-based modeling (DM) to BIM constitutes a new methodology rather than the simple introduction of a new tool. BIM has already become mainstream in practice. But there is limited number of publications that address how this critical development can be used effectively in higher education. The critical research goal of this study is to document a method of using BIM as an effective pedagogy to teach a large, mixed-level technology course. A BIM-enabled pedagogy (BEP) was developed and tested in a Building Materials and Construction Methods (BMCM) class to compare with traditional drafting-based modeling pedagogy (DMP). The preliminary results demonstrated that BEP is more effective than DMP for teaching technology courses in an architecture curriculum. The aims of this research are as follows: (1) introduce an integrated, BIM-enabled pedagogy in the BMCM course; (2) identify applicable BIM-based techniques useful in architectural education; and (3) present some interesting findings regarding the effectiveness of this pedagogy for students at different levels. The pedagogical approach is discussed, and further research tasks are identified.