Dr. Diana Franco Duran is an Assistant Professor in the Engineering Systems and Environment Department at the University of Virginia (UVa). She manages the new Construction Engineering and Management (CEM) Concentration of the Civil Engineering program.
When planning and developing the courses of the new CEM tracks, Dr. Duran realized that course content and materials are often not adequately tied to professional practice. That is why, after having benefited from learning Primavera P6 through Plan Academy back in 2016 when pursuing her Ph.D. at Virginia Tech, she decided to incorporate Plan Academy’s online Primavera P6 training as part of her online Construction Planning, Scheduling, and Control course at UVa.
According to her, “Plan Academy’s format matches the teaching-learning ecosystem we aim to achieve in our new CEM concentration, which reconciles theory and practice through context and practice-based curricula.”
Frequently, students struggle to connect and apply the technical knowledge they learn in each course to practical and complex real-world scenarios. However, in her online scheduling course, students value incorporating the Primavera P6 Foundation course alongside the video lectures. According to the students, watching the class lectures before watching the Plan Academy videos helped them put things into context and grasp the concepts more quickly.
One of her students said,
“By using the video lessons available within the Plan Academy lesson modules, I was able to learn many basic and complex functions of P6 in a way that was unlike any other learning experience I have had at UVa thus far. Plan Academy’s instructional approach of allowing students to learn by “doing” – by providing students with downloadable files to follow along during each lesson topic – significantly contributed to my understanding of how P6 can be used as a functional project management tool for real-world construction projects. Additionally, by subdividing each module into smaller, more comprehensible lesson videos, I could digest the information more effectively and learn the intricacies of P6 at my own pace. In all, I am grateful that I had access to these Plan Academy videos while taking the construction scheduling course at UVa; they contributed to my understanding of both the P6 software itself and how it can be used as a valuable tool within the broader context of the construction industry.”
Through this partnership with UVa and Dr. Duran, Plan Academy seeks to continue helping college graduates gain the technical knowledge, practical experience, and lifelong learning skills they need to cope with the complexity and uncertainty surrounding engineering and construction projects.
