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Hydraulic and Drainage Course in a Construction Management Program

Abstract

This paper focuses on what to teach students in a Construction Management program within a Hydraulics and Drainage course or similarly named courses. The first author, who has taught the course for the past twenty years in an academic setting has partnered with a practitioner from the industry to evaluate the relevance of the materials taught in the course from the perspective of a construction manager in actual practice. The objective was to redesign the course, if needed, in a way so that it addresses its real life purposes efficiently and effectively. The paper details the topics that are taught and the reasons why. The paper’s emphasis is on what has resulted from this academia-industry cooperation to enhance the course and elevate it from its present state to one that is more practical and hopefully more applicable for the construction management students. The conclusion is that this course and similarly named courses in the construction management programs probably suffer from being taught more with a civil engineering emphasis than with a construction management emphasis to the disadvantage of prospective construction managers. A way to correct this tendency is suggested in terms of what other topics will be relevant in a course of this nature to go in parallel with the engineering fundamentals. These are topics that inevitably need to be conveyed so that the construction managers of the future know exactly the reasons and the importance of why things are done the way they are done and what to watch out for. Put in another way, even though the construction managers of tomorrow may not ever get involved in the civil engineering aspects of hydraulics and drainage, an understanding of the fundamentals is needed in general to appreciate why things are specified the way they are and why things need to be built the way they are specified to be built. It is hoped that this paper may generate further discussion during its presentation or after, to bring forward valuable input for enhancing courses of this nature.

Introduction

The first author of this paper has taught the senior level Hydraulic and Drainage course in the Department of Construction Technology at the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University of Indianapolis) for the past 20 years. During the first thirteen years or so, this course was taught with a civil engineering emphasis since the department offered A.S. and B.S. degrees in the areas of Civil Engineering Technology and Construction Technology. According to the State of Indiana rules for registering to become a professional engineer, graduates holding the B.S. degree could sit for the EIT and FE exams, provided they had enough experience, to become registered professional engineers if they opted to do so and they still can. However, later on, the emphasis for the B.S. degree graduates of the Department became more focused on construction management than on civil or construction engineering and preparing students for the P.E. license was no longer a part of the mission.

The said course was revised to reflect the changes in the Department’s focus but probably never to the degree that it would serve the needs of the current graduates more aptly in today’s construction management workplace. Thus the reason why the first author, increasingly bothered by relevance of the course the way he was teaching it, decided to partner with a

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Sener, E., & Kieser, D. (2006, June), Hydraulics And Drainage Course In A Construction Management Program Paper presented at 2006 Annual Conference & Exposition, Chicago, Illinois. 10.18260/1-2--395