Inclusive Learning Approach to Teach Concepts of Pavement Management Systems to Seniors and Graduate Students in Civil Engineering

The goal of this paper is to disseminate an enhanced methodology and strategy to college instructors that can be successfully employed in a data-driven, project based course like Pavement Management Systems (PMS). PMS is a course offered in the Department of Civil Engineering at Rowan University’s College of Engineering. The objective of the course was to provide a thorough understanding of the pavement management process and demonstrate how concepts of life cycle cost analysis are utilized in the decision making process. The course required students to utilize state of the art approaches that are typically employed by transportation agencies to analyze pavement performance data at the project and network levels. The PMS course was offered as an elective course dedicated to senior-year, undergraduate students as well as graduate students (i.e., Masters and Doctoral students) in Civil Engineering; whose academic interests lie within the field of transportation engineering. Lectures were conducted with the aid of multimedia presentations and students were often asked to form groups of two and participate in classroom assignments. The classroom assignments typically focused on material covered and incorporated authentic PMS scenarios and actual pavement performance data. In the second half of the course, undergraduate students were required to form groups of 3 and develop a data-driven, research, project that compared PMS used in the United States to those used in a developed and developing country. Graduate students were required to form groups of two, and formulate a research project using pavement performance data from the Federal Highway Administration’s Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) database. All groups were then asked to present weekly updates of their respective research projects to the class in order to receive feedback from their peers and instructors. Based on the feedback from student evaluations of the class project and overall PMS course, 77% of students agreed that the class project helped them to learn about pavement rehabilitation strategies and performance models and 64% of students agreed with the format of the weekly project presentations. Undergraduate students gave the teaching style and format of the course an overall average score of 3.94 out of 5 while the overall average score for graduate students was 4.64 out of 5. Introduction Over the last few decades, the use of transportation infrastructure has continued to increase in many developed and developing countries due to population growth and economic expansion. This escalating use of transportation infrastructure; coupled with financial constraints, has forced transportation agencies to shift more attention on the preservation and maintenance of existing infrastructure (i.e., pavements) rather than the construction of new highways [1]. For example, the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) invested $91 billion in 2013 for the purpose of pavement maintenance to restore the road network to a satisfactory, operational condition [2]. The main objective of any federal, state or municipal transportation agencies is to develop an efficient system of planning for the maintenance, rehabilitation, and construction of roadway networks; within the confines of allocated funding. Most transportation agencies utilize a pavement management system (PMS) to achieve this objective.