Application of Personal Learning Environment to Teaching BIM for Construction

A BIM class for construction often requires hands-on practice, from which students pick up skills for project acquisition, clash detection, estimating, and constructability analysis. The BIM course presented in this paper uses an industry-sponsored class project designed to teach students how to use BIM for construction planning and acquisition. Students produce a 3D model from scratch, come up with their own construction schedule, and combine the 3D model and construction schedule to produce a 4D construction sequence model. They also produce several time-line animation clips explaining how they want to build the building. One challenge is that they need to learn how to use several BIM applications such as Autodesk Revit Architecture, Revit Structure, Revit MEP, Autodesk NavisWorks, Google SketchUp, Google Earth, and Microsoft MovieMaker in a very short amount of time in order to use them for their class project. This paper presents how the “personalized learning” concept was utilized to teach students how to use multiple computer applications in a short amount of time and get their class project finished on time with a certain level of quality.