XV European Conference on Soil Mechanics & Geotechnical Engineering Athens,

September 12-15, 2011

Workshop on Education with the theme

Case histories in Geotechnical Instruction:

Appropriate cases for each educational level

(date will be announced by the end of 2010)

Organized by ERTC 16

Local host: Dr. Marina Pantazidou

Case histories are recognized as an important part of geotechnical engineering education. However, most frequently, geotechnical instructors have to rely on their own practice to include case studies in their classes and rarely make this material available to the community of geotechnical educators in a format readily used by others. Perhaps the lack of publicly available instructional material for case histories is related to the lack of discussion on the characteristics of cases that make them suitable for different educational levels and different educational objectives.

The Organizing Committee of the XV European Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering kindly accepted the proposal of the Chairman of the European Regional Technical Committee 16 on Education & Training Prof. Iacint Manoliu, to include in the programme of the Conference a Workshop entitled: “Case histories in geotechnical instruction: appropriate cases for each education level”.

The workshop aims at advancing discussion on case histories and compiling case histories suitable for geotechnical instruction.

Contributions for the workshop are sought covering the following topics:

1) Suitable learning outcomes when cases are incorporated in instruction (e.g., students become aware of professional issues, students become familiar with a problem or an analysis method or comparisons between methods, students get opportunities to practice a specific calculation method, get experience in design…)

2) Case histories presented within the framework of specific geotechnical courses, accompanied with comments on the portion of the technical details students will be able to follow due to prior of concurrent instruction

3) Case histories used in a problem-based learning framework, i.e., case histories used to motivate theory instruction.

Authors are encouraged to indicate, whenever possible, sources to get materials suitable for instruction, such as the one built by ASFE – Association of Soil & Foundation Engineers which compiled description of case highlighting professional issues (see: www.asfe.org ).

The workshop will close with a discussion on how can the geotechnical community contribute to the development of case materials suitable for instruction. To this end, Dr. Pantazidou will report on the results of an effort led by the ISSMGE to build a Case History Database (you can contribute too! Please visit http://www.issmge.org/web/page.aspx?refid=503 and http://www.civil.ntua.gr/docs/pantazidou/).

Relevant deadlines are as follows:

November 15, 2010: titles + abstracts of proposed papers are sent to Adres poczty elektronicznej jest chroniony przed robotami spamującymi. W przeglądarce musi być włączona obsługa JavaScript, żeby go zobaczyć. and Adres poczty elektronicznej jest chroniony przed robotami spamującymi. W przeglądarce musi być włączona obsługa JavaScript, żeby go zobaczyć. . The abstracts need to make clear the relevance of the proposed article to the theme and description of the workshop; case histories unrelated or loosely related to instruction are not suitable submissions.