The Academic and Emotional Impact of Virtual Construction Site Visits on Students During a Pandemic Period

Abstract During the year 2020, students and lecturers have faced academical and emotional challenges like no other generation before them due to the COVID-19 implications around the world. Lecturers have found themselves looking for innovative activities that make the interaction student-teacher more dynamic and less screen-based, while maintaining all the fundamental elements of the academic program. Construction- site visits are a pivotal element in the development and completion of the competences of the Civil Engineering program in Structural Design. Due to the intrinsic characteristics of these visits, such as close social interaction and the need of physical presence in the area, they've stopped being a viable option in the contingency times. The main objective of this work is to present virtual construction-site visits as viable alternative, as well as presenting the positive impacts of these visits in students during a contingency period. Virtual construction-site visits create vivid experiences that help the students deal with the confinement, the possibility of expanding their horizons as there are no geographic limits for the visits and finally maintaining the possibility of transferring their academical knowledge to real life applications. Using technological tools such as Zoom Meetings and Facebook Live, the lecturer will attend to the construction site and transmit the visit live. Those tools provide live interaction that allow students to ask questions in the moment, which is a main difference if they were only watching a recording. Another advantage is that all the students will have the same visibility which is hard to achieve in the field due to large groups space complications, among others. At the end of the virtual visit students will answer a satisfaction survey via Google Forms in which they will state their general perspective in various aspects of the virtual visit, including but not limited to: favorite and less favorite aspects of the visit, general impression of the visit, quality of technological aspects and the overall score they will give to the activity.