An Instrumental Co-Genesis Approach to Developing an Online Practice-based Environment for Teacher Education

LessonSketch is an online, multimedia-based learning environment that supports practice-based teacher education. A work in progress since the development of its initial components in 2008 and its launch in 2011, LessonSketch has served more than 3,000 users, consisting mainly of teacher educators, in-service teachers, and pre-service teachers. In this paper, we show how we have applied an instrumental co-genesis approach to the design of LessonSketch in order to address its users’ changing needs and their difficulties using LessonSketch. The instrumental co-genesis approach consists of multiple design-utilization cycles, each of which helps us understand how users’ needs develop and how they deal with difficulties using LessonSketch, thus informing how we improve the environment in the following cycle. Through this work, we have developed a number of design principles that can be useful for the development of online learning environments that support practice-based teacher education.The work reported in this paper is supported by NSF grants ESI-0353285 and DRL-0918425 to Patricio Herbst and DRL- 1316241 to Daniel Chazan. Opinions expressed here are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110700/1/SITE2015-ChieuBoileauHerbst.pdf-1Description of SITE2015-ChieuBoileauHerbst.pdf : Main Articl

Building information modelling (BIM) implementation and remote construction projects: issues, challenges, and critiques.

The construction industry has been facing a paradigm shift to (i) increase productivity, efficiency, infrastructure value; quality and sustainability (ii) reduce lifecycle costs, lead times and duplications via effective collaboration and communication of stakeholders in construction projects. This paradigm shift is becoming more critical with remote construction projects, which reveals unique and even more complicated challenging problems in relation to communication and management due to the remoteness of the construction sites. On the other hand, Building Informational Modelling (BIM) is offered by some as the panacea to addressing the interdisciplinary inefficiencies in construction projects. Although in many cases the adoption of BIM has numerous potential benefits, it also raises interesting challenges with regards to how BIM integrates the business processes of individual practices. This paper aims to show how BIM adoption for an architectural company helps to mitigate the management and communication problems in remote construction project. The paper adopts a case study methodology, which is a UK Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project of BIM adoption between the University of Salford, UK and John McCall Architects (JMA), in which the BIM use between the architectural company and the main contractor for a remote construction project is elaborated and justified. Research showed that the key management and communication problems such as poor quality of construction works, unavailability of materials, and ineffective planning and scheduling can largely be mitigated by adopting BIM at the design stage