Challenges Facing BIM Education: Development of Appropriate Teaching and Learning Resources

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is becoming the new norm in the AEC industry and also part of many construction project management (CPM) programmes. In terms of teaching BIM there is the need for specific resources in explaining the theoretical principles of BIM, BIM tools (authoring, audit and analysis) and building models themselves. Theoretical resources that are available for education in the form of books, articles and websites are easy and straightforward to locate. Likewise a good share of various tools are available for educational purposes. On the other hand, actual building models represent a challenge in terms of preparing and optimising usage of the model for high quality educational purposes. This paper addresses the difficulty in walking the narrow line between an industry ready BIM versus a BIM that is good for student learning and offers a realistic and practical, but simultaneously achievable learning environment. Conducting a case study in an undergraduate CPM education setting, three approaches for obtaining BIM resources were identified with various challenges and benefits. A combination of internally developed models for early exposure and industry models for later courses is proposed.