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Effective communication is essential for students in construction management and relevant fields. Nevertheless, very little emphasis on communication practices has been placed in the construction management curriculum, and limited communication skills are still widely found among students. Ideal construction site visits not only supplement traditional learning in the classrooms but also provide opportunities to communicate with professionals onsite. However, challenges exist that limit the application of site visits and ultimately reduce such opportunities to practice communication skills with experts on the jobsites. This research aims to help overcome the barriers by proposing a novel approach that leverages 360-degree digital sites with virtual human as conversational partners on site (iVisit-Communicate). In this paper, the design and development processes of iVisit-Communicate were described in detail, followed by a case study of its implementation on a digital site visit to a mechanical room. It was found that most students agreed that iVisit-Communicate provided them an opportunity to practice communication skills. 

Field trips are widely recognized as an essential educational component to connect classrooms with the real world. When students don’t have access to real field trips, virtual ones have been developed by educators and researchers. Pedagogical agents have been applied to serve as a tour guide and educational tool that facilitate students learning in a virtual learning environment. Such agents are computer software generated and controlled entities that replicate or emulate humans. Previous studies have found that adding anthropomorphic traits to pedagogical agents in learning environments has significantly improved students’ learning experience; however, this area has yet been explored in the context of a virtual construction field trip. In this study, a virtual field trip to a complex mechanical room was developed using 360-degree panoramas and a pedagogical agent was employed to lead the tour. This study focuses on one single anthropomorphic trait - deictic gestures, which are pointing gestures used to refer to specific objects – and explores how such trait affects students’ quantitative learning outcomes and feedbacks on four aspects of the agent, including facilitating learning, credibility, human-like, and engaging. It was found that deictic gestures can improve students’ learning performance and attitudes on multiple aspects of the agent. 

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.