European joint program in construction IT - early experiences

In autumn 2001 nine universities started a project with the aim to develop an interuniversity postgraduate program in Construction IT. The program will be offered to students on most of the partner universities, and on some of them it should start already in the academic year 2003/2004. The students will attend the subjects in different ways: face to face at home universities, face to face at partner universities, as well as by means of open and distant learning. The program has been developed with the purpose that students will not only get the best subjects, but will also get the very important experience of other universities and cultures, and of using IT in the learning and working process. Some partner universities, like University of Salford, already got experiences in distant learning. To extend them and to try more, mostly videoconferencing technologies, TU Dresden and University of Maribor joint two classes of students in the early 2003 and run a 30 hour seminar on “Mobile Computing in Construction.” Valuable observations have been taken, which were then used to design an ideal distant learning environment. The paper describes the background, the teaching experiment itself, the observations made, and the specification of an integral distant learning environment, as a framework of a Virtual University in Construction IT. for the determination of physical behaviour, systems for construction management, or systems for enterprise resource planning. The courses are mostly civil engineering oriented and are therefore lacking consistency from the aspect of informatics or information technology. Graduates, coming to the construction industry, only know how to use the existing information systems, but have no idea of the many hidden potentials of today’s IT. To improve this situation, some civil engineering faculties enriched their curricula by advanced IT (and ITC) courses, typically database systems, visual programming and component technology, Internet technologies, product and process modelling, or general information system development. To reform undergraduate curriculum is, however, not an easy task. The question of how much IT a civil engineer needs has very many different answers. Therefore an IT focused postgraduate course seems to be an easier way of upgrading the knowledge of civil engineers with the necessary IT understanding. Since adequate human resources and experiences in Construction IT are scarce it has been proposed to join forces and develop an international multiinstitutional postgraduate program (ITC Euromaster 2002). The main objectives of the project: to accelerate the transfer of latest (Construction) IT into practice, but also accelerate the research and development in the field; to further develop the Construction IT network and enable better cooperation between participating institutions. Furthermore, construction business is getting extensively internationally oriented and strongly linked with the developing e-business, requiring engineers who are well prepared for these purposes. Therefore the development of ITC education must be seen as an integral part of e-Europe. But there are also negative effects of the dispersed students and teacher’s situation, which requires effective solutions for overcoming the distance problem. The solution, again, is in using IT to support multimedia distant communication. The issue of developing a distance learning environment is the main topic of this paper. 2 EUROPEAN MASTER PROGRAM IN CONSTRUCTION IT Discussion in Reykjavik in 1999 resulted in a project proposal, which has been submitted to the Socrates Erasmus call in 2000 (Erasmus 2002). The proposal has been accepted and in autumn 2001 the project started for the duration of two years. The main purpose of the project is to develop a curriculum on ITC to give students the possibility to extend their knowledge in the application of computer science in civil and building engineering. The result, a European Masters curriculum in Construction IT, should complement the existing portfolio of teaching programs and meet the growing demand for such skills. In the case of those institutions already offering ITC courses, the project will provide the added value of a European dimension for their existing ITC program. The following universities joined the project consortium (in alphabetical order): 1. Universidade do Algarve, School of Technology 2. Technische Universiteit Delft, Subfaculteit Civiele Techniek, Afd. Bouwtechniek & Bouwprocessen 3. Technische Universität Dresden, Fakultät Bauingenieurwesen 4. Universidade nova de Lisboa 5. Univerza v Ljubljani, Fakulteta za gradbeništvo in geodezijo 6. Univerza v Mariboru, Fakulteta za gradbeništvo (coordinator) 7. Háskóli Íslands, Reykjavik 8. University of Salford, School of Construction & Property Management 9. Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Faculty of Civil Engineering 10. University of the West of England, Bristol The partner institutions are among the leading ones in the ITC field. The IT Institute at the University of Salford is offering a MSc/Ph.D. Construction IT distance learning course, TU Delft is currently offering a PhD program in Construction Informatics, which includes Product Data Technology, Knowledge Technology, Communication Technology and Construction Robotics. The coordinating institution, the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the University of Maribor, is developing ITC related subjects since 1979. A special effort has been focused on continuous improvement of subjects and their systematic integration in undergraduate as well as postgraduate programs. The faculty is also participating in related projects, with which results will be mutually enriched: a Tempus program “Open and distance learning in technical education” (Tibaut, 2000a), and “The Student’s Computer”, which is also expected to positively influence the IT share in education. Its goal is to equip every student with a mobile computer, and to adequately adopt the lecture rooms and the courses (Tibaut, 2000b). Based on an early draft of the curriculum and on the results of a skill audit and review of existing courses at partner institutions, as well as market research and analysis, a course structure has been set consisting of 12 subjects (Table 1). Subject Coordinator Partners Role of IT in construction Ljubljana Bristol Databases and data structuring Maribor Dresden Information modelling and retrieval Lisboa Delft, Dresden Software engineering Dresden Ljubljana, Delft Modelling and visualisation Delft Dresden, Maribor Knowledge Management Delft Dresden, Ljubljan Knowledge Based Systems Algarve Dresden, Lisboa Communication / Web Bristol Ljubljana Mobile Computing Maribor Dresden Virtual Enterprises Lisboa Algarve, Dresden Computer Integrated Construction Bristol Dresden, Ljubljana eBusiness and eCommerce Dresden Delft, Lisbon Table 1. ITC Euromaster curriculum and the responsible partner institutions. To each subject a responsible partner has been assigned who is coordinating the development of the content and of the teaching material. Teaching materials will be prepared in conventional as well as in an ODL form. The curriculum will be offered either as a new studying program or included in relevant existing programs, depending on the partner’s current situation and higher education system. On most partner institutions a new postgraduate program on Construction Information Technology will be offered, giving a “European Master on Construction Information Technology” as the postgraduate academic degree, which will enable students either to continue the studies as PhD students or to work in the industries as civil engineers with a specific focus on Information Technology. It is planned to start the courses in the academic year 2003/2004. The curriculum is focused on students who have finished their undergraduate studies with a university degree in civil, building or structural engineering. A roughly estimated average of 10 students per participating country per year would give about 50 students in the first year. It is, however, expected, that the number will increase in the following years. The civil and building industry with related areas will need more engineers with profound IT understanding and knowledge in the e-society of tomorrow. The outcomes of the project are also most important for the competitive position of the building industry, which urgently needs a better IT support, for which it mostly needs highly educated people with relevant knowledge and understanding. Offering courses in the proposed distributed way will give the students the best existing knowledge and quality in the ITC field, enriched with the European dimension. It is expected that the effects of the project will influence the development of the whole construction industry. 2.1 Cooperation instead of competition The main idea of the common course development has been to share and to jointly further develop the knowledge in the ITC area. During the preparation phase of the project, a skill audit has been conducted to establish the existing expertise available at all participating universities in ITC areas. Each partner has also carried out a market survey in its country to identify the knowledge and skills required by the building and civil engineering industries. This helped the project partners to decide the scope of course curriculum. At the end of this phase a course document was completed covering course structure, course contents, delivery methods, assessment methods, marketing and recruitment strategies, and plan of the operation of the course delivery. The second phase of the project is to develop the course contents. The curriculum is being developed in such a way that courses will be offered from several universities in conventional as well as open and distance learning (ODL) form. In this way the courses will give the best quality that partners can offer regarding their staff, experiences, materials and equipment. Each partner institution will contribute different numbers of subjects to the joint program depending on the matching between the curriculum topics and the existing expertise of each institution as revealed in the first phase (see table 1). The courses once developed will be taught through a combination of face-to-face teaching and Internet based distance learning teaching methods. Students will register with each individual institution and study the taught units offered at their own institution through the well-established mode of delivery prevailing at the institution. In addition, the students will study taught units offered by other partnering institutions through Internet based distance learning complemented by lectures delivered by visiting academics. In this way the accessibility of courses will be maximized. Students will also have opportunities to visit other universities during their study. This will provide them with a flexible and interesting learning experience, as well as getting more familiar with engineering methods, technologies and culture of specific countries. The distance learning delivery system will be based on the model pioneered at the University of Salford in its Internet distance learning courses (Salford 1999). The distance learning arrangement will enable the partnering European universities to share teaching and learning resources and provide their students with a high quality European wide ITC curriculum. After the project is finished we expect to start the programs in the academic year 2003/2004. Each partner will be responsible for seeking approval at its own university to run the joint Masters in Construction IT course. At most partner institutions a new postgraduate ITC program will be introduced. An international steering committee will assure continuous running and improvement of the curriculum and related programs, as well as adequate continuous marketing and recruitment. During the development of the curriculum a strong network of partner institutions has formed, which enables a smoother flow of knowledge and experience in the ITC field between partners, but also broader. The list of interested parties, which has been set up in Reykjavik (CIB W78 2000), also includes institutions from USA (Stanford University), Canada (University of British Columbia) and Australia (University of Technology Sidney). At the 1st international ITC in Education workshop in Portorož in September 2002, which was strongly influenced by the ITC Euromaster project, the ITC@EDU Network has been founded at the panel discussion to support and link together teachers in the area of Informatics and IT in Construction (ITC@EDU 2002). Therefore the significance of the project exceeds the curriculum development alone, as it has become the linking point for the further development of ITC education globally. 3 DISTANCE LEARNING EXPERIMENT The main parts of our joint teaching experiment were commonly held lectures transmitted by videoconferencing tools. The lecture series consisted of single lectures that are already part of the individual curricula of either University of Maribor or Dresden University of Technology. The lecture content was modified in moderate way; however it had to be translated into the English language in order to allow for bi-lingual teaching mode (English / German). The goal was to improve the teaching and learning methods and skills with a special focus on ODL-technologies. 3.1 Content, and Course of Events As mentioned, we combined five modules each running over 6 academic hours. The following modules were taught: • Introduction to Mobile Computing • Business Process Modelling • Information and Data Management • Communication and Agent Technology • Best Practices for Mobile Computing The ODL-scenario allowed the integration of guestlecturers from Carnegie Mellon University to present their experiences and research results within the last module and thus enhance the scope of the lecture series to an international level. The teaching material was presented to the students by using shared applications. In most of the cases Powerpoint slides were presented using the application sharing mode of “NetMeeting”. After the lectures the teaching material was additionally made available to the students through the existing webbased platforms of each partner university. Using separate platforms allowed for individual schedules and additional seminars taught individually. 3.2 Technical Infrastructure We used two layers of interaction to connect the lecturer’s and class rooms as depicted in figure 1. The “Video & Audio Layer” supported the communication between the distributed locations. A multi-point conferencing unit was provided by the University of Maribor. According to older experiences (Menzel, Ilal, Hartrkopf 1998) the performance of the TCP/IPbackbone has been improved since that time. Within our experiment, it was possible to establish audio/video communication between the facilities of the participating universities with sufficient quality by using the internet. page 1 C K. Menzel, 05/09/ 00 DL_Bsp_Teach_Eng.ppt TU Braunschweig, Inst. für ComputerAnwendungen im Bauingenieurwesen & Carnegie Mellon University, CBPD, Pittsburgh, PA Carnegie