Development of a Project-Based Online Course for BIM Learning

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to present a method for developing a project-based online course for building information modeling (BIM) learning. As the development of BIM has gradually increased its influence on the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries, countries around the world have begun to focus on BIM education and import it into university courses. However, there have been many studies pointing out several problems with the BIM education curriculum. For example, BIM education should not be limited to modeling work, and students do not exactly know the entire BIM workflow. Therefore, this research proposed a project-based online course development method for solving BIM educational issues. The proposed method contains a course development process and guidelines for designing the course. As an example implementation, a five-week Autodesk Revit learning curriculum was developed. Such a curriculum was then utilized in a 32 student class for testing its effectiveness. The results showed that students could understand the BIM process more effectively through the designed project-based course. Additionally, with online video tutorials, students are free to allocate their study time based on their personal needs and adjust their learning progress for better understanding of the course contents.