Collaborative Approach in Construction Education: Towards a More Constructivist Experience

Abstract

Education of the built environment is moving towards more collaborative practices. The intent behind the collaborative approach of teaching is to encourage students to explore the unknowns and unravel the problems themselves, with the professor acting as the facilitator. This paper presents a collaborative pedagogical approach that was adopted to teach students from two geographically distant universities. The occasion used was preparation of student teams for Associated Schools of Construction (ASC) student competitions. The participants began by engaging online in a virtual environment and later moved to face-to-face collaboration solving an interdisciplinary design build problem as part of the student competition. The authors adopted an action research method to enhance the capabilities of the students to understand and generate constructive behavioral changes. The intention was to empower the students to explore new horizons by ‘clarifying and negotiating’ ideas and concerns. The authors evaluated the usefulness of this pedagogical approach based on direct and indirect measures. The pedagogical approach presented is a part of an ongoing initiative between two universities that have shown positive results based on the teams’ performance in the competition as well as affirmative feedback from the student participants.