Effectiveness of Interactive Teaching in Construction

Modern-learning technologies offer a rich set of tools that could be used to supplement teaching methods by making it easier to distribute information, interact on-line, and implement web-based quizzes or blogs. This paper will present the results of a pilot study to teach ― Engineering Construction‖ to a 350 civil engineering student class with the assistance of a mix of e-learning tools designed to promote active learning. 150 students participated in a study to find out if and how the students‘ unique learning preference correlates with various activities that required the students to become active or interactive. A powerful tool fostering participative learning was the real-time polling of students during a lecture applying the web-based Poll Everywhere system. A response could be sent as an SMS message or via the internet using Wi-Fi. The paper will discuss how this technology was implemented and presents data about how the different learning styles adopted i