The construction management department is renovating the number of units in its curriculum to follow Cal Poly policies and have students graduate in four years or fewer, construction management head Allan Hauck said.
University policies now require that all programs go to 180 units to graduate, Hauck said. The construction management curriculum is currently at 198 units, but the university is allowing it to reduce its units in phases.
“Overall, 90 percent of the construction curriculum is still the same,” Hauck said, “but it’s just getting the number of units right and adding a few classes to improve overall.”
The department is changing the number of units and adding courses to the new curriculum to comply with university policies, Hauck said.
A year and a half from now, Hauck said, the department will take the final steps down to 180 units.
The faculty was already reviewing the curriculum before the university required the change, Hauck said.
The department is not planning to remove courses from the curriculum, Hauck said. Course units will be altered through the revised curriculum. Some courses will be replaced with an alternative, he said.
“The only courses being eliminated are simply cleanups for replacing the alternative course,” Hauck said.
Changes in the curriculum include adjusting the number of units in certain courses and methods in instruction, construction management professor Barbara Jackson said.
Lab courses will be changed to lab and activity courses, Jackson said. And some activities will be online interactive, allowing students to engage in their activities online instead of in a lab, she said.
“The reason we changed it was to make the course more efficient and less boring for the student,” Jackson said. “The notion was to increase the interactivity with the students and to make it more streamlined, more efficient for them and faculty, and also to streamline their rate to graduation.”
Students will be able to complete the program quicker with the Cal Poly graduation unit requirement, Jackson said.
New additions in the curriculum will include a two-unit course in construction law, Hauck said, and a lab-based construction materials course the architecture department is no longer teaching.
The new courses being added bring an opportunity for freshmen to take construction management classes right away, Hauck said. Four years ago, almost all the courses students took in construction management were junior or senior level, he said.
“The material being presented is much more aligned with the way students are going to learn their profession and act in their profession,” Hauck said.
Sasha Alexander contributed to this article.