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Site visits or field trips are widely recognized by construction educators to engage students in active learning, supplement traditional lessons, and achieve better student learning experiences. However, site visits pose significant logistical and accessibility challenges for educational institutions and teachers, limiting the number of students who can benefit from them. Moreover, the restrictions on site visits have widened recently, as the reality of COVID-19 public health concerns have compelled instructors to fast-transition to online course delivery, canceling most site visits. The purpose of this study is to present construction students with online site visits to supplement contextualized learning in risky, unsafe, or impossible-to-achieve situations. In this project, Mozilla Hubs® was used to establish a virtual collaborative environment that resembled a real-world site visit to a building facility. A pilot study (i.e., a plan-reading assessment) was employed within the virtual environment that provided affordances involving an in-depth learning experience through collaborative communication. The findings demonstrate that virtual collaborative site visits give unique chances to deliver spatiotemporal contexts of sites online and provide an effective remote alternative when these learning opportunities are unavailable.
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This content will become publicly available on July 23, 2026
Applying Systematic Learning Progression in Online Construction Site Visits
Virtual site visits are increasingly becoming a viable educational tool for educators to supplement or replace traditional visits when these are challenged by logistical issues, inaccessibility, or safety hazards. Recent research has explored the integration of theory-based learning strategies, such as collaborative problem-solving and multimedia learning, in online construction site visits to support construction students’ collaborative skill development and learning effectiveness. However, there remains a lack of understanding of how to guide students systematically from conceptual knowledge to more complex, hands-on, or procedural knowledge, which often leads to a fragmented learning experience in current online site visit designs. This study aims to integrate active learning approaches (i.e., systematic learning progression) into online site visits to facilitate students’ development of situated knowledge. In this project, a collaborative online site visit focused on building mechanical systems was created, where students worked in pairs to achieve four specific learning objectives, progressing from conceptual to procedural knowledge regarding building mechanical systems. The findings provide insights into the integration of systematic learning progression within virtual collaborative spaces for online site visits and demonstrate the effectiveness of such site visits in supporting students’ situated knowledge.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2141682
- PAR ID:
- 10625652
- Publisher / Repository:
- Associated Schools of Construction (ASC)
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 279 to 268
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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