ABSTRACT
The construction industry has grown in size and complexity over the past decade, as has the demand for construction professionals. In addition the intellectual, cognitive and experiential skills required of these professionals has evolved against current requirements as the range of knowledge, understanding and personal skills expected of them broadens. To meet these demands in an affordable way, information technology is playing an ever-increasing role, especially the use of Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) packages. Such packages bring construction site operations to the classroom environment and are safe ways of allowing learners to experience many diverse site conditions and construction techniques. However, the costs of developing and implementing these IT based solutions are appreciable and need to be matched against educational aims and objectives. This paper suggests that the challenges of cost effective CAL development should be the shared responsibility of educators, developers and CAL users. It describes a framework that has been developed to illustrate the interrelationship between these three parties. This framework has been developed by drawing on relevant learning theories, which are also reviewed here.
