Abstract:

With the accession of the country in 2007 in the European Union, civil engineers in Romania had to cope with a radical change of building codes, generated by regulatory harmonization requirements. Ten years after the enforcement, in 2006, of the European harmonized seismic design code, P100-1/2006, even though several post-graduate courses and presentations have been organized by academia and professional associations, several engineers still have difficulties in fully understanding the new regulations. In the meantime, a revision of the code was enforced, P100-1/2013. An online LLL platform, SEISMOCODE, is designed by the authors in the framework of an ongoing national collaborative project, to assist civil engineering practitioners in the assimilation of the new regulation and of related provisions in other building codes. The Moodle platform, chosen for the development is, at present, an open and versatile environment for the implementation of virtual online learning environments, that answer to various pedagogical objectives: online practice communities, individual or cohorte learning. Moodle is largely used especially for academic media for distant learning, as well as for the teaching, learning and assessment support. As opposed to the traditional implementations, the authors of the paper have designed the SEISMOCODE platform characteristics from the point of view of the LLL necessities and of the peculiarities of the civil engineering field and have implemented a purely virtual platform, completed with social media, which provides capabilities oriented to self-paced learning and self-assessment. The paper presents the instructional design and implementation strategies, highlighting the elements of innovative use of the platform. The objectives of the SEISMOCODE platform are to provide a useful and efficient environment for the exploration of a complex content, which would ensure the assimilation and verification of knowledge. The development and organization of instructional materials and resources is described, as well as the results of a preliminary evaluation of the platform.

Keywords:

Lifelong learning, e-learning, civil engineering, seismic code, seismic design.