Tertiary delivery modes and construction industry sector habits, do they match yet?

Collaboration has become a buzzword, whether describing tertiary educational delivery modes or themes in industry related conferences, or touted by leaders in the construction industry sector. Educational organisations would not thrive without collaboration, and hence the term collegiality. Over the last two or so years Unitec has been developing and facilitating delivery modes involving blended learning, and project based learning for the undergraduate construction management and construction economics students. Teamwork and real-world learning is the norm. The question is, “How real is integrated collaboration in our construction industry as yet and does it yet match the focus of the Integrated design and construction management undergraduate course run at our institute?”. How the course is delivered and assessed is compared with the findings and trends from the industry assignment, and presented in this paper. The findings suggest that whilst the majority of projects are still being run on the Design-Bid-Build basis of design then construct in that order, that there appears to be a slow but obvious shift toward several companies working collaboratively with clients, stakeholders, designers and contractors from the earliest stages of the project