The Department of Civil Engineering offers a cutting-edge curriculum, blending academic theory and practical activities. A variety of methods have been adopted to enhance the learning and teaching process involving formal lectures, course notes, study guides, directed reading, class tutorials, practical/laboratory sessions, field trips, assignments, individual and group projects.

The Department is committed to building ‘active learning’ into all learning and teaching activities to strengthen student engagement. Special emphasis is placed on innovation, project management, team work and practical/problem-solving capabilities in order to help students develop into professional engineers. The Department has an overall goal of incorporating active learning into all areas of undergraduate teaching.

Active learning initiatives that are being piloted in Department include:

• Use of interactive student response hardware “clickers” to strengthen student engagement in lectures
• Inclusion of project-based leaning curriculum, studio-based design classes, practical field sessions and design-build-test team projects into civil engineering programmes
• Incorporation of computer aided learning (CAL) packages as an alternative resource to support conventional lecture deliveries
• Development of interactive computer aided assessment (CAA) software to provide individual assessments for students. These will be used both in a formative and summative mode as part of module coursework
• Video recording of lecture presentations which will be made available online as a podcast using the XJTLU’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) ICE
• Incorporation of Virtual Laboratories into the coursework, such as TecQuipment virtual structural laboratories
• Implementation of the Conceiving, Designing, Implement, Operating (CDIO) educational framework on civil engineering programmes.