Enhancing the Interest of Undergraduate Students in Geotechnical Engineering Using the CACPLA Pedagogy

Enhanced geotechnical engineering education at the undergraduate level is of great significance in motivating students to pursue their career in geotechnical engineering. The decreasing number of students with geotechnical engineering interest is of concern to the growth of the geotechnical engineering profession. Many students lose interest for fear of rigorous laboratory work, poor lecture planning, and delivery modes. The use of innovative pedagogical approaches can help reverse this trend, as it will reduce learning gaps and lead to deeper learning experience. For this reason, a new pedagogy which recognizes the learning trends of students has been developed as a blended online teaching approach. The approach is based on a modified version of the co-operative hands-on, active, problem-based learning (CHAPL) and the discover, learn, practice, collaborate, and assess (DLPCA), pedagogies. The approach encompasses an array of learning styles and fits into a broad range of students. The new pedagogy CACPLA (communicate, active, collaborate, problem-based, learning, and assess), is relatively easy to adopt to the conventional geotechnical engineering coursework. We adopted the CACPLA method to a typical geotechnical design of a foundation course to fourth year civil engineering students at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, to experiment on the students learning outcomes. We hypothesize that using the CACPLA pedagogy for lecture delivery, instructors can increase the enthusiasm of students in geotechnical engineering education.