Flipping the Construction Management Class: Beneficial?

Flipping the class means changing the traditional style of teaching (via lectures) to facilitate selflearning through engaging the students. The students’ attention span is as short as 15 minutes; hence, the traditional lecturing does not promote effective learning. Sometimes, flipped class looks chaos when 50 or more students interact with each other to try to solve engineering problems to arrive at the right solution. Nevertheless, at the end of the class period, the number of students that learn the subject precisely improves a lot. Recently, flipping the classes has been used widely in all kinds of classrooms across the globe, whether it is K-12 educational institution or post-secondary educational establishment. Construction Management is a course that cannot be taught by mere lectures only. It has a lot of definitions, principles, theories and hypotheses that need to be taught in 50-minute class setting. Given the fact that the attention span is short for most of the audience, it is difficult to create keen interest among students in the class for the whole 50 minutes’ period. Effective teaching is very difficult to incorporate in the classroom. Flipping the class to hands-on activities yields promising results. Hands-on activities can include exercises such as group discussion, Building Code review exercises, Shadowing Construction Managers at construction sites, working through construction management software and working on a mock construction project. This paper explores the different ways of flipping classes and their advantages and disadvantages through different case studies and the personal experiences of flipping classes for the past 20 years of teaching.