Abstract:

According to Smart Market Report on BIM released by McGraw Hill in 2009, there is consensus in the construction industry, especially among contractors, that Building Information Modeling (BIM) helps to reduce conflicts and changes during construction. Most contractors, as many as 83% of them, who participated in this investigation recognized that the use of BIM produced the highest rewards on a project.

As more clients begin to require BIM on jobs, many contractors expect higher education institutes to teach students how to use BIM especially for construction management. They expect students to know how to create a 3D model using a specific BIM application, how to detect clashes, and if possible how to create a 4D construction sequence model.

In order to meet the industry’s expectation, our BIM class uses an industry-sponsored class project specifically designed to teach students how to use BIM for construction planning and acquisition. Students enrolled in the BIM class are requested to produce a 3D model from scratch using 2D drawings provided by the industry sponsor, come up with their own construction schedule, combine the 3D model with the construction schedule to produce a 4D construction sequence model. While working on the script explaining their construction sequence, students produce several time-line animation clips supporting their script, and then edit them together to produce a 3-minute video clip explaining how they want to build the building. Students who successfully took our BIM class were well received by the construction industry because of their practical understanding of BIM in construction.

One challenge is that students need to learn how to use multiple BIM applications such as Autodesk Revit Architecture, Autodesk NavisWorks, Google SketchUp, Google Earth, and Microsoft MovieMaker in a very short amount of time. Because of class assignments scheduled across the semester, the instruction was able to allocate only a small amount of time to explain how to use these applications.

In order to handle this challenge, we came up with a Goal Oriented Active Learning (GOAL) pedagogy based on the theory of personalized learning, which encourages students to take a best advantage of online resources available on the Internet to pick up new knowledge at their comfortable speed, and exchange ideas with peer students using social networking tools. This paper presents how we used the concept of personalized learning to encourage students to actively pick up necessary BIM skills they need to accomplish the goal they set up.

Keywords:

BIM, Active Learning.