New ways to teach and learn project management: Creating construction labor & productivity videos

This paper describes a graduate class that used video cameras to capture and analyze labor/productivity work sequences at a large construction project. The video segments, construction sounds, still images, and music were incorporated into a polished video using Adobe Premiere even though the participants had only 2 one-hour tutorial sessions of training. With the advent of inexpensive camcorders replacing expensive time-lapse film, graduate students in the College of Architecture, Design and Construction at Auburn University now have the ability to capture time and motion studies in order to analyze construction labor practices that desperately need improving. The ease of use of Adobe Premiere coupled with the drastic reduction in computer hardware costs, have enabled students to create high-end projects in only 8 weeks that normally took months of research and post-production work only 5-10 years ago. A demonstration of the video projects is proposed for the conference.