Online Construction Engineering and Management Master's Program

The general superintendent, engineering staff and construction manager, in order to manage, schedule and complete the heavy construction project, must be aware of problems associated with the completion of the complex project. Problems associated with pile driving & shoring, excavation methods, tunneling, trenchless technology, and rock excavation are reviewed. Examples and case studies are discussed with alternate solutions reviewed based on site conditions and economic considerations.

This class introduces students to procedures for balancing key project constraints in the face of adversarial contractual arrangements, multiple prime, and single source contracting as well as externalities.

Various aspects of construction and safety techniques are discussed along with strategies for building a corporate culture of zero accidents, planning for high project safety performance, establishing accountability for safety, and maintaining a safety communication network.

This course is a study of construction industry customs, practices and methods from project conception to close-out. Equipment usage, construction estimating, scheduling, and management techniques are woven into the fabric of this course.

This course introduces the student to the construction industry, built environment history, development and current theories.

This course provides an overview of construction project scheduling concepts and computer applications employed in construction including scheduling logic, critical path method, resources management, progress monitoring, and probabilistic scheduling methods. Learners will discover the key project scheduling techniques and procedures including; how to create a network diagram, how to define the importance of the critical path in a project network, and defining project activities float. Also covered are the fundamentals of Bar Charts, Precedence Diagrams, Activity on Arrow, PERT, Range Estimating, and linear project operations and the line of balance.

This lecture course covers civil engineering materials, their properties, and their construction use. Specifics to be discussed include physical and mechanical properties of steel, concrete, asphalt, wood, plastic, timber, and soil. Coverage of ASTM standard tests covering these properties is also presented.

This course deals with the problems of managing a project. A project is defined as a temporary organization of human and nonhuman resources, within a permanent organization, for the purpose of achieving a specific objective. Both operational and conceptual issues will be considered. Operational issues include definition, planning, implementation, control and evaluation of the project; conceptual issues include project management vs. hierarchical management, matrix organization, project authority, motivation and morale. Cases will include construction management, chemical plant construction and other examples.

This course is a study of the elements and concepts of temporary supportive structures involved with heavy construction process. Topics of discussion will include codes, construction, cofferdams, temporary sheeting and bracing, falsework and shoring, and concrete form design.

The impact of engineering projects on the physical, cultural, and socioeconomic environment, preparation of environmental impact statements, regulatory framework, and compliance procedures will be discussed. Topics include: major federal and state environmental regulations, environmental impact analysis and assessment, risk assessment and risk management, and regulatory compliance.

This course introduces managers to the essence of business economics – the theories, concepts and ideas that form the economist’s tool kit encompassing both the microeconomic and macroeconomic environments. Microeconomic topics include demand and supply, elasticity, consumer choice, production, cost, profit maximization, market structure, and game theory while the Macroeconomic topics will be GDP, inflation, unemployment, aggregate demand, aggregate supply, fiscal and monetary policies. In addition the basic concepts in international trade and finance will be discussed.

This course will provide the student with the principles and techniques of financial and managerial accounting for technical organizations. The emphasis will be on the use of financial data for decision making. The basics of accounting will briefly be covered, with the major amount of time spent on ways to understand, analyze and use the data for decision making. Budgeting and analysis of performance, as well as, recognizing fixed and variable expenses are other key areas of financial management. Issues of valuation, time value of money, uncertainty and risk will be integrated in the material. The one-term course will make extensive use of the text by Weygandt et al (see below), supplemented by cases, exercises, homework and examinations. Emphasis will be on real-world, practical application of the tools of finance to management decision making.