BIM Studio - An Immersive Curricular Tool for Construction Project Management Education

Present approach to education within most design, construction and built environment schools is reported to be fragmented. As the industry moves towards more collaborative and integrative paradigms, the education sector needs to start shaping the 'pipeline' of graduates that can better fit the changes occurring in industry. This paper is an offshoot of an ongoing sponsored research project aims at addressing this issue in an effort to stay abreast with the development on the Building Information Modelling (BIM) front in the industry; especially in an emerging market such as India. The model that forms the core of the BIM approach is a smart, shared and computable three-dimensional model of the building or the civil engineering facility that helps in overcoming the shortcomings of the 2D paper-based approach. The goal of this project is to formulate a curricular strategy that allows, in a flexible and scalable way, construction project management programs to utilize BIM in providing an integrative and immersive learning experience to its students. In order to formulate the proposed strategy, studio-based course is developed in which BIM models are utilized to integrate and synthesize learning from a number of construction project management courses. The objectives and learning outcomes of the proposed studio-based course are in sync with the existing program/course objectives.