Over the past decade, the global construction industry has shown a clear and urgent need for its professionals to command building information modeling (BIM) knowledge. Many educational institutions have thus incorporated BIM into their construction engineering and management-related programs. However, BIM education faces several challenges, such as the difficulties in transforming existing programs, a lack of instructors with sufficient practical knowledge and misalignment of educational outcomes and industry needs. Many educators thus advocate university–industry collaboration, but this effort is hampered by unanswered questions, including when, what and how both parties can contribute to the collaboration to achieve a win–win situation. This article attempts to answer these key questions in BIM education by relating them to university–industry collaboration in pedagogical design, course delivery and educational outcomes. It does so by conducting a case study whereby the researchers adopted a non-participant observation approach to observe the experience of participants in teaching and learning a BIM course. Feedback from the participants showed that such collaboration could help to narrow the gap between educational outcomes and industry needs. Based on that outcome, another contribution of this research is an analytical framework developed and substantiated to provide a more structured way to guide ‘town and gown’ collaboration for BIM education.

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The implicit staggered-grid (SG) finite-difference (FD) method can obtain significant improvement in spatial accuracy for performing numerical simulations of wave equations. Normally, the second-order central grid FD formulas are used to approximate the temporal derivatives, and a relatively fine time step has to be used to reduce the temporal dispersion. To obtain high accuracy both in space and time, we propose a new spatial implicit and temporal high-order SG FD stencil in the time–space domain by incorporating some additional grid points to the conventional implicit FD one. Instead of attaining the implicit FD coefficients by approximating spatial derivatives only, we calculate the coefficients by approximating the temporal and spatial derivatives simultaneously through matching the dispersion formula of the seismic wave equation and compute the FD coefficients of our new stencil by two schemes. The first one is adopting a variable substitution-based Taylor-series expansion (TE) to derive the FD coefficients, which can attain (2M + 2)th-order spatial accuracy and (2N)th-order temporal accuracy. Note that the dispersion formula of our new stencil is non-linear with respect to the axial and off-axial FD coefficients, it is complicated to obtain the optimal spatial and temporal FD coefficients simultaneously. To tackle the issue, we further develop a linear optimisation strategy by minimising the L2-norm errors of the dispersion formula to further improve the accuracy. Dispersion analysis, stability analysis and modelling examples demonstrate the accuracy, stability and efficiency advantages of our two new schemes.