Intensifying the relationship between e-learning postgraduate students

The postgraduate course for construction management and economics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne is an e-learning course for architects and civil engineers. The students are mostly fulltime employees, who put a strong emphasis on minimizing disruption of their normal work. This design uses both group work and collective website building to compensate often observed disadvantages in Internet based courses such as solitude and ineffective learning. The course is organized as a well-balanced mix of online work and face-to-face meetings, which has shown to be vital for the creation of good working relationships between the students. They bring construction projects from their practice to elaborate the content of the course. By working on actual projects a strong link between work and education is created. This paper outlines the important components of the course and discusses the results of a preliminary evaluation.