TECHNOLOGIES APPLIED TO HIGHER EDUCATION IN EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING: A CLASSROOM AND LABORATORY INTEGRATED METHODOLOGY

In many countries, the syllabus of architecture or civil engineering studies includes learning to design structures in earthquake-prone areas. Commonly, teaching structural analysis courses requires the inclusion of two thematic units: theory and experiments. In the case of earthquake engineering, the experimental part is especially important because, fortunately, students are not usually familiar with experiencing earthquake loads. In contrast to gravity loads, destructive earthquakes have long return periods and students sometimes have erroneous ideas: they tend to think that learning how to prepare structures for this type of accidental event is not that important. The author believes that the best way to enhance the interest of the inexperienced students in learning earthquake engineering is to expose students to the physical behavior of a model structure subjected to an earthquake up to collapse, through shaking table tests simulated in a laboratory. This experience triggers students' desire to know more about the phenomenon, to learn how to predict the response and how to prepare the structure for such an scenario.

The purpose of this paper is to present an innovative educational project for teaching earthquake engineering, based on an enhanced classroom and laboratory integrated methodology. In the classroom, the main theoretical concepts of dynamics and analytical tools for predicting the seismic response of structures are explained by the teacher. The theoretical contents are supported by dynamic tests conducted in a Laboratory. Both theoretical knowledge and empirical experiences (i.e. tests) are tightly linked together and scheduled so that the student first experiences the physical phenomena in the laboratory, and later understands the mathematical modelization in the classroom. Two types of experiments are used: (i) simple dynamic tests conducted by the students in the laboratory on small-scale specimens; (ii) complex dynamic shaking table tests on large-scale structures that are performed by the teacher in the Laboratory and observed online and in real time by the students through video streaming. An extensive use of new technologies and online educational tools are proposed to motivate students' participation in dynamic shaking table tests conducted in the laboratory.