Teaching Design Management tools during a pandemic: A Peruvian case study

Abstract

During the year 2020, the sanitary emergency norm forced universities to teach under the remote learning method, representing a challenge of designing courses that require high effectiveness. The purpose of this work is to present the strategies that were successfully applied during the teaching of design management tools for a building project, implemented in a course part of the Civil Engineering master of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. The methodology considered the effect of the Covid-19 Pandemic and had as objective to develop soft skills and employability, for which a balanced use of virtual platforms as well as software was proposed for videoconference and laboratories. On the other hand, during this course, students developed a proposal for integrated planning and management of the design phase using tools of norms and guidelines of project management systems such as ISO 21500, Lean Construction, Building Information Modeling, PMBOK of the Project Management Institute, Integrated Project Delivery, among others. Under this framework, the participation of stakeholders, multicriteria decision making, development of project design deliverables and project sequence was analyzed, which presented an important change under the collaborative contracts. The success of this methodology is reflected in the high quality of final papers and expositions, the result of surveys taken - effectiveness of 99%-, and in the improvement opportunities detected. This paper presents important information that may be adapted by academic and practitioners during the phases of the pandemic and post-pandemic.