Successful Academic Partnership in the Development of an International Construction Practices Course

The challenge of working effectively with multicultural teams will continue to grow in importance. Students graduating from engineering and construction management programs need to be functional in this global environment. To address this need, this paper discusses a successful partnership among several international universities to develop a construction practices course designed to prepare engineers for the global workforce. The course specifically focuses on sharing global construction engineering and management practices and includes partnerships primarily with universities located in the U.S., China, India, Canada, and Chinese Taipei. Development challenges confronted by the leadership team pertained to planning and logistical issues and technology issues. Students gained tremendous knowledge about construction practices and issues in other countries and got a taste of what it will be like when they work in the real world and are faced with communication issues on multi-national teams. The significance of this paper is to provide lessons learned to help others better understand the challenges of developing a successful partnership among multiple international universities. Introduction As in many other industries, globalization is having a significant impact on engineering education and the construction industry. The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) cites factors such as increased access to high performance computing, Internet connectivity and other technology by previously under-developed countries as some of the reasons for the increased number of firms globally that are now competing for engineering projects (1) . In some cases, major projects require the contributions of virtual global teams made up of members located in different parts of the world. These teams often function across multiple time zones, multiple cultures, and sometimes multiple languages. They also can take place synchronously (live) or asynchronously (viewed at a later time). The challenge of working effectively with multicultural teams will continue to grow in importance. NAE authors predict that a globalized market place will present many challenges, but at the same time they suggest that significant opportunities will exist if engineering educational programs can provide learning experiences that operate under some of these same conditions (2) . To provide exposure to students on global construction practices, an international multiinstitutional course has been developed and offered by a consortium of seven universities from six different countries. This paper provides a brief overview of this course including the background, content, structure, teaching approach, and assignments. This is followed by a discussion of the challenges related to planning and executing this course. Also, sustainable construction practices are discussed, providing insights about the lessons learned by the students. Finally, recommendations are provided to enhance future offerings of this course. Course Content Development of this course involved not only esteemed internationally known faculty and professionals in the field of civil engineering from countries such as Germany, Ireland, Panama, Singapore, and South Africa. In addition, the course involved professionals in other fields including librarians with special copyright expertise, engineering distance education program P ge 1.32.3 administration, strong teaching assistant support, video communication experts, and an instructional designer. Students are presented with a critical body of knowledge related to international construction management practices (e.g., bidding/procurement, safety, finance, leadership, communications, legal aspects, dispute resolution, and sustainability) and develop an appreciation for designing and building projects in a multinational, multicultural, and multilingual environment. Content is delivered using a combination of live and pre-recorded lectures or presentations and the course has been offered twice thus far. The course was targeted for senior undergraduate and graduate students in construction management and civil engineering programs. Each formal partner institution was required to provide content for one session including preparing lecture notes and identifying a construction organization willing to participate in the session both through the video recording of its site operations and participation by a project representative. In addition, guest speakers from industry and academia lectured on such topics as global construction challenges, procurement issues, legal aspects, international finance and public private partnerships, leadership, industry best practices, and lean construction techniques. Other topics covered included specific construction practices in Canada, China, India, Ireland, Italy, the U.S., Germany, South Africa, and Latin America. Assigned readings were to be completed before each class period. The text used for this course is Global Engineering and Construction (3) , a book that covers most of the relevant topics covered in this course. Additional background information, appropriate readings from textbook chapters, scholarly journals, and trade publications were also available in digital format to all enrolled students. In addition to lectures by faculty and guest speakers on key topics relevant to global construction, teams of students from each institution were required to give presentations on construction practices found in their respective countries, and each student was required to participate in a collaborative term project across universities. An online open-source discussion forum, called Piazza, was available to students from all participating institutions. The goal was for all students to interact with one another through this forum, sharing their opinions by posting questions and answers for their classmates. Teaching assistants also served as liaisons with the speakers, conveying student questions or comments and sharing the responses with students in the discussion forum. Although students from each participating institution shared the same lecture content and readings, specific assignments and grading requirements were determined by the local instructors at each institution. Structure and delivery mode Development of this course was truly a team effort from the beginning. Without this strong collaborative effort, this course would not have been possible. As each university had its own academic requirements and schedule, the course needed to be structured in a flexible way so that the participating institutions could adapt it to their curriculum and semester schedule. This course was offered for 3-credits with 45 contact hours and included both lectures and field experiences. Evaluation of student participation and performance was the responsibility of each individual institution. Each university had a slightly different syllabus. A summary of the key attributes of this course are as follows: Purpose: course to share sustainable global construction practices pertaining to procurement, legal issues, risk and finance, best practices and leadership. P ge 1.32.4 Partner Institutions: NC State (Host), IIT-Madras, University of Calgary, Tianjin University, and Tsinghua University, and National Taiwan University Delivery mode: combination of synchronous (live) and asynchronous (pre-recorded) media Assignments: 2 major (1 report and presentation on construction practices in their country and 1 report on increasing the use of sustainable construction practices in different countries) and 1 independent report. The slotting of timing for the course had to be worked out given the challenge of offering it across various time zones. Ultimately, NC State and IIT-Madras offered the class meetings synchronously (through a two-way classroom video conferencing hook-up) in the morning for NC State and evening for IIT-Madras). With the use of Mediasite rich media capture software, NC State made recordings of these live synchronous class meetings and shared them with the University of Calgary where students viewed the pre-recorded sessions together at weekly class meetings. Since Tianjin and Tsinghua Universities began their semesters six weeks after the other universities, it was decided that they would watch most of their lectures using a prerecorded format. Tianjin decided to join three lectures live and use the pre-recorded Mediasite recordings for other classes. Tsinghua decided to participate using all pre-recorded content. The University of Ulster used several of the pre-recorded lectures which were integrated into an existing course that had separate assignments. National Taiwan University planned to offer this course another semester in a completely pre-recorded format. The course blends several delivery modes including face-to-face (with both synchronous and asynchronous delivery of lecture content) and online instruction. The host university, NC State, offered one section of the course as an on-campus, face-to-face class with Dr. Jaselskis as the faculty member who introduced the outline for each lecture and who kept the class on schedule. For the first offering of the course the class met once weekly for 3 hours with a 5 to 10 minute break and included a combination of live and previously recorded lectures throughout the semester. The second offering used a flipped approach whereby the students watched 1 to 2 hours of prerecorded content prior to class and then attended a 2 hour lecture in which new material was covered. The course originated from an NC State studio classroom, at times having a guest speaker in the classroom at NC State, at other times having speakers join the class via video conference, and at other times having in-class students view pre-recorded presentations. All in-class activities including the lectures were captured using Mediasite, a lecture capture tool that can create webcasts to be viewed in real