Collaborative Internet project management in education

With the increasing proliferation of collaboration tools in the design and engineering industry, it is now possible for team members-to work on, building projects from any location, synchronously or asynchronously,, with all the latest project information available in a shared database. This study is an experiment carried out, over a period of one semester, on a senior-level building construction class at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. The class-consisting of 25 students and two instructors-was set up to mock a typical architectural engineering and construction project team. The class project was based on a real-life construction project from an. existing firm. The experiment allowed us to investigate how students adapt to new technologies, as well as providing an ideal setting in which the activities and needs of collaborating groups can be studied.