A paradigm shift toward workforce development is essential to ensure that the future workforce meets the expectations of the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. Both industry and academic communities play different, but essential and complementary roles, which suggests a need for stronger industry–academia collaborations. These could be achieved by connecting instructors with practitioners through web-based collaborative platforms. However, user requirements for facilitating such collaborations on web-based platforms are yet to be formalized. As a precursor, this study investigates the factors which instructors in AEC-related academic programs would consider when collaborating with AEC practitioners to complement their pedagogical efforts. Understanding these factors could aid the development of web-based networking platforms that could facilitate greater interactions between industry and academia in preparing students for the workplace. To ensure triangulation, a mixed method approach was adopted, and data analysis was conducted from individual differences perspective based on demographic characteristics. Instructors’ considerations are influenced by students’ preferences and bias, students’ career and development, ease of organizing course-support activities, student learning outcomes, curriculum structure, and ethnic and gender diversity. The results showed both demographic similarities and differences in the considerations of instructors. The results of this study could serve as inputs for the design of a web-based collaborative network of instructors and practitioners. This study contributes to expanding literature on collaborations between industry and academia for future workforce development. The study also offers insights that could enhance these collaborations for maximal benefits to students. © 2024 American Society of Civil Engineers.

The need to prepare students for the workplace, shortage of skilled labor, and fast-paced changes in the industry necessitate improvements in the pedagogical frameworks of educational communities. Practitioners are required to provide practical insights, rigor, and realism to complement academia pedagogic efforts in construction education. However, this is being plagued by several complexities. Leveraging advances in computational techniques, this paper presents the considerations of practitioners and instructors in workforce development collaborations as inputs for a graphical user interface of a technology-driven matching platform for connecting professional and educational communities. Practitioners' considerations are students and specific course-support related, while instructors' considerations are related to practitioner suitability, project, and company characteristics. The study contributes to human factors principles in user interface design as well as user-centered design principles by highlighting information requirements of a collaborative network of instructors and practitioners. The findings of this study also provide insights to enhance industry-academia collaborations.

Equitable access to communities of practice for future workforce development has been challenging for construction education instructors. This has been identified as one of the triggers of deficiencies and disparities in the skills and competence of new construction engineering graduates and consequently, dissatisfaction of employers. To address this challenge, a web-based collaborative platform was designed and developed to integrate both communities. This study presents a usability evaluation of the web-based platform from instructors' perspective using quantitative and qualitative analyses. The results from semi-structured interview, ratings of system usability scale, and trust scale were used to infer users' acceptance of the platform. The results reveal high acceptance of the platform by end users as a tool to connect with practitioners for workforce development collaborations. The results also show required improvements to enhance users' experience. The study provides a guide for the usability evaluation of similar matching platforms.

PurposeThere is a growing mismatch between the skill demands of the industry and the offerings of academia. One way of reducing this mismatch is by improving collaborations between practitioners and instructors using web-networking platforms. However, it is important to understand practitioners' considerations while collaborating with instructors. Therefore, this study identified these considerations in order to infer inputs for the design of the graphical user interface (GUI) of a web-based platform for connecting instructors and practitioners.Design/methodology/approachA mixed method was adopted through a survey and focus group. A survey was used to capture practitioners' considerations while collaborating with instructors for student development, and a focus group helped uncover an in-depth understanding of the study phenomena. The data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics and thematic analysis.FindingsThe results show the willingness of practitioners to collaborate with instructors for student development, the ways by which practitioners are willing to meet instructors' course-support needs and their considerations in deciding to do so. Slight differences were observed between the results of the survey and the focus group regarding the ranking of the practitioners' considerations. The study highlighted demographic differences in practitioners' considerations when deciding on meeting instructors' course-support needs. The results provide a basis to deduce the GUI inputs of web-networking platforms for connecting instructors and practitioners.Originality/valueThis study revealed practitioners' design needs and GUI inputs to facilitate the design of web-networking platforms for connecting instructors and practitioners. This study also contributes to user interface design principles, theories on individual differences and practitioners' involvement in student professional development.

The problem of coordinated data collection is studied for a mobile crowdsensing (MCS) system. A mobile crowdsensing platform (MCSP) sequentially publishes sensing tasks to the available mobile units (MUs) that signal their willingness to participate in a task by sending sensing offers back to the MCSP. From the received offers, the MCSP decides the task assignment. A stable task assignment must address two challenges: the MCSP's and MUs' conflicting goals, and the uncertainty about the MUs' required efforts and preferences. To overcome these challenges a novel decentralized approach combining matching theory and online learning, called collision-avoidance multi-armed bandit with strategic free sensing (CA-MAB-SFS), is proposed. The task assignment problem is modeled as a matching game considering the MCSP's and MUs' individual goals while the MUs learn their efforts online. Our innovative free-sensing mechanism significantly improves the MU's learning process while reducing collisions during task allocation. The stable regret of CA-MAB-SFS, i.e., the loss of learning, is analytically shown to be bounded by a sublinear function, ensuring the convergence to a stable optimal solution. Simulation results show that CA-MAB-SFS increases the MUs' and the MCSP's satisfaction compared to state-of-the-art methods while reducing the average task completion time by at least 16%.

The construction industry has been a predominantly White/Caucasian Men community with a very low representation of women and people from traditionally marginalized backgrounds. Even though companies have been implementing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) statements for many years, we still believe it is neither a diverse nor equitable field. To better understand how DEI statements declared by companies have been understood and recognized by employees, a survey was deployed nationwide to understand how professionals in the construction industry perceive their organization's DEI statements or policies. A complete data set was built from 249 participants. 75% identified themselves as men and 25% as women, and nobody identified with other gender identities. More than 80% of participants were White/Caucasian, 4% Black or African American, 4% Hispanic or Latinx, and 6% Asian. Participants are currently working in small (24%), medium (30%), and large (46%) construction and design companies located across The United States. Regarding the number of employees, companies are small, less than 99 employees; medium, between 100 and 499 employees; and large, more than 500 employees. Also, companies were grouped into four main types, building construction companies (67%), transportation construction companies (6%), special trade contractor companies (17%), and design companies (10%). For more than 65% of professionals in the construction industry who participated in this study, DEI was mainly related to proper representation of women and minoritized populations in the workforce; Merit-based transparent recruitment and promotion; equality, social justice, and nondiscrimination policy statement; and equitable payment and compensation. Other factors such as proper representation of women and minoritized populations at the top management level and payment structure transparency did not emerge from the results. We also found that 70% of professionals identified DEI statements in their companies and 30% of professionals did not identify or did not know about DEI statements. Looking at the company size, 85% of professionals in large companies identified DEI statements in their companies, but 71% and 42% of professionals in medium and small companies identified DEI statements in their companies, respectively. According to the company type, more than 80% of professionals working in design companies recognized DEI statements in their companies, but around 60% in construction and special trade companies. We can highlight that large companies have established policies and practices that result in better socialization and recognition of their DEI statements than medium and small companies. Also, construction and special trade companies need to strengthen their DEI statements and increase the representation of women and people from traditionally marginalized backgrounds. Results from this research give an idea about the current state of DEI in the construction industry and would contribute to the current effort to increase the diversity of the nation's construction workforce.

The construction industry is rapidly changing due to the greater adoption of innovations and technology. This has necessitated changes in the competencies that the industry demands from new graduates. For academia to meet the changing needs of the industry, the inputs of practitioners are needed to complement academic pedagogical efforts. This study leverages the potential of Web 2.0 to develop a web platform called ConPEC to facilitate instructor-practitioner collaborations for enhancing student learning. ConPEC is aimed at providing instructors with equitable access to practitioners, increasing the participation of practitioners in instructors' pedagogical efforts, and enabling greater interaction of students with their communities of practice (CoP). These could facilitate achieving a proper blend of theory and practice in construction engineering education as well as ensure that students possess the competencies that the industry demands. This study demonstrates the efficacy of design principles in designing information systems. This study also demonstrates the usage of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to explain and understand practitioners' acceptance of ConPEC. The findings reveal that practitioners perceived ConPEC to be useful, easy to use, and user-friendly. Practitioners' behavioral intention-to-use ConPEC is significantly influenced by attitude toward usage, perceived ease of use, and trust. Trust also significantly influenced perceived ease of use. However, perceived usefulness has no direct significant influence on practitioners' behavioral intention-to-use ConPEC. The study uncovers practitioners' acceptance behavior toward ConPEC which could be leveraged for further system development. The study also provides a framework that can be leveraged in diverse domains to develop similar initiatives aimed at addressing skill gaps in fresh graduates.

Enabling quantum switches (QSs) to serve requests submitted by quantum end nodes in quantum communication networks (QCNs) is a challenging problem due to the heterogeneous fidelity requirements of the submitted requests and the limited resources of the QCN. Effectively determining which requests are served by a given QS is fundamental to foster developments in practical QCN applications, like quantum data centers. However, the state-of-the-art on QS operation has overlooked this association problem, and it mainly focused on QCNs with a single QS. In this paper, the request-QS association problem in QCNs is formulated as a matching game that captures the limited QCN resources, heterogeneous application-specific fidelity requirements, and scheduling of the different QS operations. To solve this game, a swap-stable request-QS association (RQSA) algorithm is proposed while considering partial QCN information availability. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed RQSA algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed RQSA algorithm achieves a near-optimal (within 5%) performance in terms of the percentage of served requests and overall achieved fidelity, while outperforming benchmark greedy solutions by over 13%. Moreover, the proposed RQSA algorithm is shown to be scalable and maintain its near-optimal performance even when the size of the QCN increases.