Teaching construction project management with BIM support: Experience and lessons learned

This paper presents experiences and lessons learned during the introduction of Building Information Models (BIM) in construction engineering project management courses. We illustratively show that the introduction of BIM-based project management tools helped the teachers of two courses to develop more realistic project-based class assignments that supported students with learning how to apply different formal project management methods to real-world project management problems. In particular, we show that the introduction of BIM allows educators to design a class project that allowed the use of more realistic cases that better simulate real-world project conditions, helped students to learn how different project management methods integrate with each other, integrate change management tasks in a class assignment, and learn how to optimize project plans.

Research Highlights► BIM allows using holistic real-world cases that better simulate project conditions. ► BIM allowed learning three project planning methods in an integrated way. ► BIM allows the incorporation of change management in assignments. ► BIM allows learning project plan local optimizations. ► We recommend construction engineer programs adopt BIM to develop practical skills.