The Academic and Emotional Impact of Virtual Construction Site Visits on Students during a Pandemic Period Academic Article in Scopus uri icon

abstract

  • © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021During the years 2020 - 2021, students and lecturers have faced motivational and academical challenges like no other generation before them. Lecturers have found themselves looking for innovative activities that make the interaction student-teacher more dynamic and less screen-based, while maintaining all the fundamental elements of the academic program. Like many curricula, Civil Engineering programs have had to endure important changes to adapt to the necessities of the contingency due to COVID-19. One of the most important changes has been the inability of attending construction sites due to the pandemic conditions. Using technological tools such as Zoom Meetings and Facebook Live, we are proposing virtual visits as an alternative that makes construction sites visits plausible during a pandemic. The main objective of this work is to present the positive impact of virtual construction site visits in students during a contingency period, both in academical and emotional aspects. This study will also reinforce the benefits of construction site visits and the importance of maintaining them via a virtual visit for the completion of a Civil Engineering program particularly in the area of Structural Design. Construction site visits has always been a highly valuable element of Civil Engineering programs. It allows students to visualize construction processes and translate the numerical activities studied in the classroom to tangible projects. With the pandemic and the stay-at-home guidelines, construction site visits have a positive distraction factor from reality, becoming an element that motivates the students to participate and divert themselves from the current situation, additionally to the academical benefits that the visits provides. We did a qualitative investigation by interviewing 121 undergraduate students from different courses of the Civil Engineering program just after our virtual visit activity, to find out their perspective of the benefits they obtained academically and emotionally. We arrived at the conclusion that the alternative of a virtual site visit has indeed motivated the students and that they value being able to maintain the academical elements of the construction site visit.

publication date

  • July 26, 2021