Students from the University of Michigan who are taking this semester the graduate level course CEE 544 on “Rock Mechanics” have prepared their class projects online.

Instead of having students prepare a class project report to himself, Prof. Zekkos, the instructor of the course, asked students to work in teams and prepare a project on the Internet. The student deliverable is now available to be read, reviewed and edited by research experts and experienced professionals! The rock mechanics class projects are available here.

Each project has an “Add a comment” box at the bottom that allows the visitor, whether he/she is knowledgeable on the topic or not, to provide comments. Any technical, editorial or other comments submitted online during the next two weeks, i.e., by April 20th, will be addressed by the students. Students will have to respond to them and incorporate the necessary changes to their project. They will then finalize their project and also post powerpoint slides on the topics. The web-based report and the powerpoint slides will remain online indefinitely providing useful technical content for geotechnical engineering professionals worldwide.

“We have tried this approach last year as part of a Geoenvironmental Engineering course and a Ground Improvement course and students, as well as professionals appeared to enjoy it! Professionals enjoyed reviewing student projects. Students reported that they were more motivated to work on an online project than a “conventional” project. Thus, I decided to try this again. We have also been assessing student learning using a self-assessment anonymous survey form at the end of the class.”, says Professor Zekkos.

A paper on the experience from the first implementation of the project was published in last year’s information technology in geotechnics conference: Zekkos, D. and Tsantilas, K. (2014). A New Web-Based Outreach Platform for Classroom Projects: An Application Example in Geoenvironmental Remediation, Information Technology in Geo-Engineering , D.G. Toll et al. (Eds.), IOS Press, 2014, 229-234.

Participating student teams and topics are: