Releasing the potential of BIM in construction education

When setting out to teach a group of construction students the lecturer is faced with a class who have a variety of learning style preferences and have brains with a variable ability to process information and that ability varies further with the type of processing required. They also come to the class with varying previous experience and knowledge and with varying social skills. In order to facilitate the learning the students need to be actively engaged in a task designed to cause them to interact with the information they are supposed to be learning. However learning is a complex process that requires considerable management. BIM has the potential to assist construction education in this as it can make information available in a manner that is much more accessible to visual and kinaesthetic learners (the majority of learners). It is not in itself a universal panacea to the problem of teaching construction students. The challenge for construction educators is to use this new form of information provision to enable us to move away from lecture formats and reshape our teaching delivery to a format that is better aligned with the learning styles and processes that suit most learners