Development of an Internet supportive platform for online teaching and learning of construction planning and scheduling

Construction Planning and Scheduling is taught for the first time in Semester 2, 2004 in the School of Architecture and Building, Deakin University. During the unit development process and the implementation of teaching activities, several issues arose in relation to implementing computer-aided construction scheduling and unit delivery in a unitary environment. Although various types of construction planning and scheduling software have been developed and applied, none of them can be run inside an online teaching software package, which provides powerful functions in administration. This research aims to explore the strategies to connect a project planning and scheduling software package and an online teaching and learning software package by a Web-based support platform so that both the lecturer and students can draw up and communicate a construction plan or schedule with tables and figures. The key techniques of this supportive platform are identifies and they include a web-based graphically user-interfaced, dynamic and distributed multimedia data acquisition mechanism, which accepts users' drawings and retrieval information from canvas and stores the multimedia data on a server for further usage. This paper demonstrates the techniques and principals needed to construct such a multimedia data acquisition tool. This research will fill the gap in the literature in respect to an online pedagogical solution to an existing problem.