Collaborative multidisciplinary learning : quantity surveying students’ perspectives

Abstract

The construction industry is highly fragmented and is known for its adversarial culture, culminatingin poor quality projects not completed on time or within budget. The aim of this study is thus toguide the design of QS programme curricula in order to help students develop the requisiteknowledge and skills to work more collaboratively in their multi-disciplinary future workplaces.A qualitative approach was considered appropriate as the authors were concerned with gathering aninitial understanding of what students think of multi-disciplinary learning. The data collectionmethod used was a questionnaire which was developed by the Behaviours4Collaboration (B4C)team.Knowledge gaps were still found across all the key areas where a future QS practitioner needs to becollaborative (either as a project contributor or as a project leader) despite the need for changeinstigated by the multi-disciplinary (BIM) education revolution.The study concludes that universities will need to be selective in teaching, and innovative inreorienting, QS education so that a collaborative BIM education can be effected in stages, increasingin complexity as the students’ technical knowledge grows. This will help students to build thecompetencies needed to make them future leaders. It will also support programme currency anddelivery