Civil Engineering Curriculum Research Articles

Interdisciplinary content, contestations of knowledge and informational transparency in engineering curriculum

With the introduction of key information sets (KIS) for all university programmes in the UK from 2012, the character, content and delivery of university degrees may be increasingly used by potential students to differentiate between degree programmes. Therefore, developments in curricula and the relationship to the profession are of growing importance. In this paper, we explore the role of programme content in prospective students’ decision-making and describe the prevalence of interdisciplinary content in civil engineering curricula. Following this, we detail student perceptions of interdisciplinary content. It is found that universities currently operate a varied approach to transparency regarding curriculum; students pay little attention to programme content before embarking on their chosen degree; and engineering students view interdisciplinary content in the curriculum with ambivalence, usually ascribing its necessity in the preparation for post-university employment.

Assessing curricula contribution to sustainability more holistically: Experiences from the integration of curricula assessment and students' perceptions at the Georgia Institute of Technology

There has been a rapid increase on the number of engineering schools in higher educational institutions that have incorporated sustainability into their teaching. Nonetheless, curricula reforms are still needed to better educate engineers on the implications that their work has on the environment and societies in this generation and future ones. A step to facilitate this is assessing the contribution of engineering curricula to sustainability. This assessment can provide a starting point on how sustainability is being taught, and how this can be improved. This paper presents the results from the assessment of the sustainability content of the Civil and Environmental Engineering curriculum at the Georgia Institute of Technology using two complementary approaches: the Sustainability Tool for Assessing UNiversity's Curricula Holistically system and two students' perceptions surveys. The results from the curriculum assessment indicated that the courses addressed mainly environmental issues, and that the depth of coverage could be improved. The results from the students' surveys concurred with the curriculum assessment, although there were some differences in regard to social issues. Using both approaches provides a more holistic overview of the contribution of engineering courses and degrees to sustainability, and it allows detecting discrepancies between sustainability content in the syllabus and sustainability teaching in the classroom. The approaches can help to foster educational changes by: guiding university leaders in devising curricula reforms to promote sustainability learning; providing students with opportunities to reflect upon the topic; and bridging the gap between the activities being done at the university to foster sustainability and student perception of what needs to be achieved.

Broad, Global, and Multidisciplinary Civil Engineering Education

To prepare civil engineers for work on complex societal systems, ABET criteria include requirements for broad education, knowledge of contemporary issues, and multidisciplinary teamwork. These important criteria are more difficult to interpret and assess than criteria in technical areas, and this paper draws from a range of instructional experiences to offer guidance about incorporating them into university civil engineering programs. The experiences are designing an all-university core curriculum, integrating a civil engineering curriculum, teaching broad course content to civil engineering students, assessing curriculum for an ABET visit, and offering an experimental interdisciplinary graduate course about coupled natural and human systems. Conclusions show that educators cannot completely overcome root problems such as inadequate preparation of students in the K-12 system, but they can use a range of tools such as the systems approach, institutional analysis, and explanation of key historical events to focus discussion on broad and global issues. These would, in turn, provide outcomes that can be assessed for effectiveness.

Using Information Technology to Incorporate Natural Hazards and Mitigation Strategies in the Civil Engineering Curriculum

AbstractNatural and environmental hazards include earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, hurricanes, floods, landslides, and droughts, among several others. These hazards present high risk to human lives and infrastructure. This is particularly true when such systems affect populated areas, devastating homes, highways, buildings, and social structure. A key aspect of natural hazard mitigation is the implementation of adequate strategies for data collection, processing, and sharing. This implementation can be prior to a natural disaster event for purposes of risk assessments and planning or postevent for disaster relief efforts and to document and learn from these case histories. In this paper, the authors present their experience in developing and implementing a course on natural hazards, which also focused on the benefits of using information technology (IT)-based solutions for natural hazard risk management. In the United States, most civil engineering (CE) curricula offer elective courses focusing primarily...

Structuring the Content of the First Course in Transportation Engineering: Perspectives of Engineers and Educators

The views of practicing transportation engineers and those of instructors teaching the first/introductory course in transportation engineering can serve as vital inputs in development, or redevelopment, of this course. The priorities of practitioners and educators regarding possible course topics are discussed in this paper. The ranked topic priorities of practitioners and educators compared with one another and the current practitioner priorities are also compared with an older survey. A high degree of correlation was found in both cases. Although general trends are fairly consistent, some observations about specific topics can be made; for example, the importance of including topics addressing alternatives to private vehicle travel is notably higher in the most recent practitioner survey than in the older survey. Although the information derived from these surveys merits consideration in structuring the first course in transportation engineering, many other factors should also be considered. The role of the course in the greater civil engineering curriculum, the setting of the institution, the needs of its stakeholders, and preparation for the Fundamentals of Engineering examination are all factors that should be considered as well.

Another Look at the Collapse of Skyline Plaza at Bailey’s Crossroads, Virginia

On March 2, 1973, the Skyline Plaza apartment building in Bailey’s Crossroads, Virginia collapsed while under construction. The Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) requested an investigation from the National Bureau of Standards [(NBS); now the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)]. The NBS team concluded that the most likely cause of the collapse was a punching shear failure of the 23rd floor slab. The two factors that contributed to this were premature removal of shores below the 23rd floor slab, and the low strength of the 23rd floor concrete in the area supporting the weight of the 24th floor slab. The engineer’s structural drawings required 2 full stories of shoring and 1 story of reshoring while a concrete slab was cast. The project architect and structural engineer were sued and held responsible, although their specific shoring instructions had been ignored. This case study reviews the available published information on the case to determine what lessons can be learned. The case is suitable for inclusion in variety of courses in the civil engineering and construction curriculum.

Empirical Analysis of Effect of Project-Based Learning on Student Learning in Transportation Engineering

The paper discusses results of an ongoing study of the effect of project-based learning on students' learning outcomes in transportation engineering, a required junior-level course in the civil engineering curriculum. The course was taught in 2008, 2009, and 2010 by the same instructor. The course was transformed from a lecture-based course into a project-based course, integrating a semester-long project as a stimulus for students' learning. To evaluate and compare the effects of lecture-based and project-based teaching approaches on students' learning, a survey instrument from the Laboratory for Innovative Technology and Engineering Education was used. The survey instrument included five constructs for measuring five different aspects of students' learning: higher-order cognitive skills, self-efficacy, ease of learning subject matter, teamwork, and communication skills. The survey of preassessment and postassessment student learning outcomes was conducted to determine the effectiveness of the project-based approach in enhancing students' learning outcomes. The results showed that the use of the project-based approach significantly improved students' ease of learning the subject matter. Project-based learning could be used as an effective teaching and learning strategy by educators to facilitate students' learning.

Integrating Sustainability Education in a Classical Civil Engineering Program: The Case of Transportation and Construction Courses

Sustainability has emerged as a common theme in many processes related to urban life and the built environment. However, most engineering curricula still lacks the fundamentals of sustainable practices education that prepares graduating engineers to fulfill their expected roles and conduct future business in a more sustainable fashion. A more sustainable Civil Engineering curriculum requires a more systems approach to both diagnosing transport and built environment problems as well as devising solutions to such problems. This paper examines typical engineering curricula and identifies specific courses in the areas of transportation and construction where sustainability can be injected with minimum disruption to the structure of the course and/or its connection to other courses with the intended degree. For the two subspecialties, the core and elective courses are categorized and certain areas/modules within each course are identified, where the integration of sustainable engineering education is useful. Furthermore, some educational tools that facilitate the infusion of these concepts into the two subspecialties are presented.

A NOVEL DESIGN COMPETITION FOR THIRD-YEAR CIVIL ENGINEERING STUDENTS

At many Canadian universities, there are few courses for design education in the civil engineering curriculum except in fourth year. This paper explains an innovative approach introduced by the author to promote design education using a design competition at the University of Calgary. Through this design competition, third-year students learn design concepts and apply them using a real project, integrate several civil engineering deliverables in one project without doing them in a separate course, and gain experience that prepares them for their final-year design course. The eight courses included in the competition comprise all civil engineering aspects, including structural, geotechnical, transportation, environmental, construction, material, and project management. This inaugural year’s design competition is based on the new Alberta Children’s Hospital Project. The paper discusses the competition’s purpose, structure, student participation, deliverables, and successful outcome.

THIRD YEAR INTEGRATED DESIGN PROJECT FOR THIRD YEAR CIVIL ENGINEERING STUDENTS

There is a lack of courses for design education in civil engineering curriculum except in fourth year at many Canadian Universities. An innovative approach introduced and implemented by the author to promote design education at the third year using a design competition at the University of Calgary was very successful. Student learned design concepts, applied them in the third year using a real project, integrated several civil engineering deliverables in one project without doing them in a separate course, and gained experience to get ready for their final year design course through this design competition. The eight courses included in the competition comprise all civil engineering aspects including structural, geotechnical, transportation, environmental, construction, material, and project management. The lessons learned by implementing the competition for 2 years, the author suggests a new idea to introduce a third year design project for civil engineering students. The paper discusses the purpose, structure, student participation, deliverables of the new idea.

Failure analysis of engineering structures in undergraduate courses using optimization

ABSTRACTIn the design process for engineering structures, it is often of interest to determine the largest magnitude of a given form of load that can be applied on a structure before causing failure. This gives the factor of safety against failure. Determining the factor of safety entails analysis of a structure on the verge of failure, and is known as limit analysis. It is well known that limit analysis can be formulated as a constrained optimization problem. With robust computational tools for optimization having become readily available, it is possible to introduce the optimization‐based approach to limit analysis at various stages in the undergraduate civil engineering curriculum. In this article, we present three instances of limit analysis using an optimization‐based approach from (i) a sophomore level Statics course, (ii) a junior level Structural Analysis course, and (iii) a senior level Advanced Solid Mechanics course. These are based on materials presented by the author in undergraduate mechanics courses at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In each case, we develop a mathematical formulation and implement the computations in MATLAB. We use two optimization tools, one from the MATLAB Optimization Toolbox and the other called SeDuMi. Classroom experience has shown that the optimization‐based approach helps students recognize the underlying thread in seemingly disparate limit analysis problems. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 22:297–308, 2014; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae; DOI 10.1002/cae.20555

Traffic Engineering in a Hybrid Format

In the civil engineering curriculum at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, the 421 traffic engineering course in civil engineering (CE) is intended to provide students with details of driver behavior, traffic characteristics, and design considerations for addressing traffic problems. In fall 2008, this class was taught in traditional face-to-face lecture format. On the basis of student feedback and success in achieving learning outcomes, it was determined that the course should be more student centered and that there should be a two-way feedback mechanism between students and instructor throughout the quarter. The course was redesigned and taught in the new hybrid format during the fall 2009 and spring 2010 quarters. This paper discusses how lessons learned from hybrid redesign of courses in other fields can be applied to a traffic engineering course. The CE 421 hybrid format involved reduced face-to-face meeting time and included learner-centered, online activities. The material was front-loaded for the students through PowerPoint presentations with narrations so that they could come prepared for the face-to-face lectures. The online activities also included simulation and surveys, which demonstrated the variation in reaction time of drivers, and videos that demonstrated the level-of-service concept and a new type of traffic control for intersections. After these online demonstrations, students were asked to fill out a survey. The results from these surveys were then discussed in class to achieve the underlying learning outcomes. A set of questions is provided as guidance for instructors who may be considering a similar redesign of their transportation engineering courses.

Impact of Nanotechnology on Future Civil Engineering Practice and Its Reflection in Current Civil Engineering Education

Current civil engineering education should address the need to provide a broad vision, develop the higher-order skills of future civil engineers, enable them to adopt emerging technologies, and formulate innovative solutions to complex problems. This paper introduces relevant nanotechnology developments to convey the new vision and inspire creativity in civil engineering. It also presents a pedagogical framework for integrating nanotechnology education into a civil engineering curriculum and cultivating self-regulated learning and creativity skills for civil engineering students. The pedagogical framework includes the introduction of nanotechnology innovations and other relevant innovative technologies, and explicit instructions on cognitive strategies for facilitating and inspiring self-regulated learning and creativity. It is implemented with problem/project-based learning for a cocurricular project that requires self-regulated learning and creativity. This pedagogical framework provides a model for int...

Preservation and Restoration of 19th Century Cast and Wrought Iron Bridges

Restoration of cast and wrought iron bridges is not covered in civil engineering curriculum and engineers have been called upon, or volunteered, to restore these structures with little or no methodology in print to guide them in their work. The writer has restored many of these bridges as pedestrian bridges, published his work in ASCE journals and made presentations at local, regional, national, and international meetings describing methods he used. A brief history of the development of cast and wrought iron bridges in the United States from 1840 to 1890 is presented. The paper discusses properties of cast and wrought iron, methods of replacing in kind or rehabilitating bridge members using casting/riveting/bolting/welding methods, dismantling or removal intact, transportation and rebuilding the structures on new sites. It concludes with images of several bridges restored by the writer.

Civil Engineers in Public-Private Partnerships and as Master Planners for Infrastructure Development

Public-private partnerships (PPP) have been actively implemented around the world since the 1980s, including projects in both developed and developing countries. Among the reasons for the growing use of this project delivery system are the deterioration of the basic infrastructure systems, the lack of public funding, and the interest of private investors for discovering attractive investment opportunities. Because of public-private partnerships as a project delivery system, civil engineers have been exposed to knowledge areas such as finance, risk analysis, public policy, and conflict resolution, which traditionally have not been taught in civil engineering curricula. Therefore, civil engineers now have opportunities to play a major role in PPP projects as master planners of infrastructure development. This paper analyzes the basic skills that a civil engineer must have in order to be an active participant in the development and implementation of PPP projects. We gathered input from industry practitioners...

Problem-Based Learning in Structural Engineering Education

Structural engineering education has been based historically on specialization within the framework of a four-year undergraduate degree in civil engineering. Many practitioners, however, are concerned that modern civil engineering curricula are not meeting the needs of the structural engineering profession. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the conversation about undergraduate education and the increased technical skills requested by the structural engineering profession. Problem-based learning is presented as a strategy for expanding the civil engineering curriculum to include concentrated study and a problem-solving experience, as well as engaging students in the process of learning how to learn. The paper reports on our experience in incorporating problem-based learning within a senior-year project. The conclusions discuss the challenges of extending this learning format to additional students.

Introducing Smart Structures Technology into Civil Engineering Curriculum: Education Development at Lehigh University

Most of today's civil engineering students are unaware of the potential use of smart structures technology in the design, construction, and maintenance of civil infrastructure systems. This paper presents recent education development in the area of smart structures technology at Lehigh University. The goal of this education development is to prepare the future engineer of society for this cutting-edge technology, for which they may see broad application in their professional practice. An overview of the smart structures technology in civil engineering applications, from a systems perspective, is first given in the paper. Educational activities incorporating smart structures technology into civil engineering curriculum are next presented in this paper.

Incorporation of Sustainability Concepts into a Civil Engineering Curriculum

The need arises to equip engineering students with a wider horizon of concepts in terms of environmental, economic, and social attributes, for decision making of sensitive to sustainability issues. Pedagogic frameworks have to address a multidisciplinary analysis of sustainability. This paper addresses the rationale behind the recent integration of sustainability concepts into an undergraduate civil engineering curriculum in Hong Kong. Incentives and barriers for implementation of the curriculum are addressed. A team-based design project with a problem-based learning approach is highlighted. The initial results of stakeholder evaluations suggested that multidisciplinary skills developed during the learning process might contribute significantly to pertinent knowledge on sustainability.

Determining the Content of the First Course in Transportation Engineering

Transportation engineering constitutes a required portion of the civil engineering curriculum at over three-fourths of undergraduate civil engineering programs in the United States. The input of practicing transportation engineers is a critical source of information in determining the content of the first course in transportation engineering. A new survey was conducted in which respondents ranked 31 potential course topics by importance. The results are compared to a similar survey conducted 20 years before to determine which topics have increased in importance, which have become less critical to cover, and which continue to remain of high priority. Topics such as traffic safety and traffic flow characteristics are of considerably higher priority today than 20 years ago, while topics such as geometric design of highways and highway capacity studies continue to be of great importance. Preparation for follow-up and graduate coursework, for the Fundamentals of Engineering and Professional Engineer examinatio...

Review of Fundamentals of Environmental Engineering by James R. MihelcicFundamentals of Environmental EngineeringWiley0-471-24313-2$78.95

The book is not new but was recently brought to my attention. As the field of environmental hydraulics becomes increasingly popular, how can we educate our hydraulic engineers to gain basic knowledge in environmental engineering? Can we combine knowledge from various sciences like chemistry and biology with the knowledge of physics and mathematics that is also required in the traditional civil engineering curriculum? This book provides a reasonable answer to these questions. It is the outgrowth of team teaching for a course required of all civil and environmental engineering students at Michigan Technological University. Several coauthors share partial credit for this text besides the primary author. The faculty members from MTU include M. T. Auer, D. W. Hand, R. E. Honrath, J. A. Perlinger, and N. R. Urban. M. R. Penn at the University of WisconsinPlatteville also contributed to the biology chapter. The course is intended to provide a bridge between basic sciences and math courses and upper-level engineering courses. The material is divided into four main chapters: concentrations in air, water, and soils; chemistry; physical processes; and biology. The brief preface uses practical examples to illustrate the need for a strong command of the fundamentals in chemistry, biology, and physical processes. The examples of municipal wastewater treatment, acid rain, and fate of chlorinated aliphatic hydrocarbons in groundwater clearly state the need for an integrated multidisciplinary approach to environmental problems. Chapter 2 delves into the nitty-gritty details of unit conversions and sets the tone for the quantitative approach of the authors. The reader is exposed to all possible units used in measuring contaminant levels in soils, water, and the atmosphere. Chapter 3 covers about 100 pages and explains the chemistry of pollutants in a variety of engineered and natural systems. This chapter includes a nice and detailed presentation of chemical kinetics, thermodynamics, equilibrium processes, oxidation/reduction processes, and photochemistry. Chapter 4 provides a 60-page discussion of mass and energy balances. There is also a brief presentation of advection and dispersion, along with a review of the movement of particles in fluids