Student Responses to Faculty Innovation in Virtual Construction Education

In response to the global coronavirus pandemic, much of higher education experienced a shift to virtual teaching and learning, requiring instructors to swiftly adapt their teaching methods. Within a construction education context, faculty interviews were conducted to discover some of the innovations and teaching strategies that were implemented. Using this data, a questionnaire was developed and delivered to students, who indicated their perceptions of these strategies and noted what they found to be helpful and what they found to be counterproductive. In general, students responded well to innovations such as virtual interactive elements and providing recorded lectures for review. Many students expressed frustration with slide-based lecturing and a loss of hands-on opportunities, a particularly poignant concern in construction education. Many teaching strategies had mixed reception, sometimes depending on the effectiveness of application. Organization and communicating expectations were emphasized by more than half of the students. In addition to discussing general strategies, anecdotal evidence is provided for construction-specific student experiences that were either successful or challenging. The contribution of this work is in providing a timely survey of construction-specific teaching strategies from faculty who experienced the transition to virtual and in directly collecting student responses to these strategies.