Design and construction pedagogy of the future: the Open AEC University

This work focuses on distance learning in the design and construction university curriculum. The aim is to "open up" the curriculum to design and construction professionals who would like to acquire more skills, thus giving access to students that could not normally participate. The first phase of this work reviews the antecedents of deployment of Internet collaboration in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (A/E/C) industry. The intent is to extract a model of Internet collaboration to be used as a starting point for building a model for Internet curriculum. The second phase tests out this new model in a pilot program. The pilot will be a collaborative, educational endeavor between Immanuel Solutions and three categories of collaborators: university partnerships, Internet Project Management and Collaboration (IPMAC) service providers, and Nigerian government agencies. The objective of this project is the development of a framework that can be applied to international standards for the 'Open A/E/C University' curriculum. The criteria for framework development are: (1) to test and exploit the global abilities of the A/E/C university collaboration effort on the Internet, and (2) to prove the viability of educational standards that cut across diverse locations.