LESSONS LEARNED ON THE REDESIGN OF CONTENT AND LEARNING STRATEGIES FOR AN INTRODUCTORY COURSE TO CONSTRUCTION IN CIVIL ENGINEERING

摘要

There is an evident relationship between the practices of the civil engineering profession and the development of a country. Besides economic development, civil engineering facilitates growth and safety of a society, mainly through the design and construction of a country's infrastructure. Even more, this influence is greatly noticeable in Latin- American countries with emerging economics, such as Colombian case. Awareness of this relevance, Colombian government has adopted educational policies with particular emphasis on the revitalization of the engineering education with the aim to increase its indexes of economic growth through a sustainable and large infrastructure system (Caro 2003). Whereby, the Colombian Association of Faculties of Engineering (ACOFI) and Colombian Institute for Higher Education (ICFES) have called for the excellence and quality in the education of engineering. Particularly, ACOFI (2006) suggests a serious curricular modernization of the engineering programs, the international homologation of the programs, and the improvement of the teaching strategies. Because, the traditional education methods, courses, and programs in engineering do not effectively satisfy the current and future needs of the industry and the society that they serve. But, some concerns arise in these emerging economic contexts: How must the construction courses be in order to face these new challenges? How much do these courses meet the current country's needs? How does student respond to new strategies implemented in class? How to assess the course improvements in order to correct timely those ineffective strategies? This article shows the preliminary results of a study that investigates the redesign of the content and the learning strategies of the course Introduction to Construction. This article shows the preliminary results of a study that investigates and assesses the redesign of the content and the learning strategies of Introduction to Construction course. The course is offered by the Department of Civil Engineering at The Universidad Industrial de Santander (UIS) -Colombia. The following sections of this paper cover the study objectives and methodology, the initial conditions of the course, improving the course syllabus, improving the instruction strategy, evaluation of course improvements effectiveness, and learned lessons and conclusion.