CI-TEAM Implementation: Educating a Competitive, Cyberinfrastructure Savvy Engineering and Construction Workforce

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

The construction industry is one of the largest in the nation and core to American competitiveness. It is also in critical need of workforce development to enable adoption of advanced cyberinfrastructure. Such investment is hindered by a predominance of small- and medium-sized enterprises and typically low education levels of an increasingly minority workforce. In response, this proposal seeks a dramatic increase in workforce skills by offering both a novel cyberinfrastructure for pedagogy as well as sustainable partnerships that address education of the workforce, university students, and select grade 9-12 learners in the use of that cyberinfrastructure. In so doing, this project will enhance industry competitiveness and support for continued cyberinfrastructure research and development. The particular focus of this proposal is a mode of education the industry calls the intelligent job site (IJS). IJS encompasses sensors, mobile computing, and wireless networking to provide both localized and project-wide decision support. The basic rationale for IJS technologies is that improved state awareness will enhance productivity and safety. Construction sites are unique, occupy sizeable areas (e.g., entire buildings), and are dynamic in nature, making effective coordination of workforce activities difficult due to varying local conditions and concomitant high degrees of freedom in worker choice of actions. A number of IJS applications are in various stages of development. However, to drive further research, considerable workforce development is necessary to speed adoption of these technologies. This project will scale up an earlier demonstration project which designed and deployed an integrated learning environment which incorporated IJS pedagogy into a unified learning environment that is easily replicable and customizable to local conditions. This implementation project will apply lessons learned through the demonstration test bed to refine, deploy, and evaluate learning modules centered on the following objectives: (1) building group dynamics, (2) promoting critical thinking, (3) enabling technology evaluation, and (4) encouraging feedback and integration within the construction process. A significant long-term goal of our project is to encourage transfer of cyberinfrastructure experience and knowledge from ongoing research to students at all levels, from workforce, to graduate students, to undergraduate students, and finally to 9-12 enrichment. To do so, the project will leverage novel collaborations with industry and technology experts to define the learning environment, modules, and objectives with the goal of ensuring that they match the expectations, needs, and expertise of the workforce in general.