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The Centre for Advanced Wood Processing at the University of British Columbia (UBC) is Canada’s national education, training and research centre for the wood products manufacturing industries, with a mandate to provide professional training to industry as well as supporting undergraduate scientific education. A unique blended learning course is currently being offered in which campus-based undergraduate students study online alongside professional non-credit workplace learners drawn from across Canada and internationally. The two learner groups share course resources through a WebCT e-learning website, but have distinctly different learning goals and assessment criteria. This approach has strengthened the undergraduate learning experience in several ways. Firstly, undergraduate learners have gained an enhanced awareness of the contextual relevance of the subject matter – through online discussions with industry learners they have learned how the concepts introduced in the course can be applied to real industrial issues. Secondly, the involvement of industry has yielded valuable feedback on what subject matter is most relevant to the world that students will enter when they graduate, which has resulted in significant improvements to the course. Thirdly, the involvement of corporate learners has encouraged industrial equipment manufacturers to donate equipment to the teaching laboratories and provide technical expertise that has strengthened both the online and in-person components of the program. Finally, tuition revenues from the industry training course have enabled the University to hire an additional technician to assist with undergraduate teaching.

The blended learning format is advantageous for industry learners as the flexibility afforded by the web-based study period increases access to such training for busy learners who are often located in remote areas. This presentation will discuss these advantages, and describe the pedagogical approaches and the development and evaluation of the course.

Stream: Pedagogies and Teaching Practices

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Iain Macdonald is the Managing Director of the Centre for Advanced Wood Processing at The University of British Columbia, Canada. He holds a BA (Honours) in Marketing from Stirling University, Scotland, and an M.Sc. in technology-supported learning from the University of British Columbia. Over the last five years he has led a number of e-learning projects in Canada and South Africa aimed at both undergraduate and professional learners.

Dr Philip Evans is a Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. He holds a B.Sc (Hons, First Class) and Ph.D. from the University of Wales and has lectured at Dundee Institute of Technology, Scotland and at The Australian National University (ANU). He has held appointments as Director of ANU’s Centre for Science and Engineering of Materials and Director of the UBC Centre for Advanced Wood Processing. He holds an Adjunct Professorship at The ANU. His research interests include the surface and interfacial properties of wood and the development of novel bio-based materials that can compete effectively with plastics, metals and concrete.