A Wood Engineering Design Course On Television

This paper discusses some aspects of the planning, production and delivery of a senior undergraduate engineering course offered by television. This course is normally taken for credit by senior undergraduates in civil and mechanical engineering and by architecture students. The TV version allows practicing engineers, architects and construction technologists to upgrade their knowledge in this field. Like in many engineering courses there are laboratory experiments and design assignments. Some innovative components of this effort are the collaborative approach to teaching (engineer + architect), the use of televised laboratory experiments (as opposed to live demonstration labs) and the use of information technologies for faculty-student interaction (fax, voice mail and electronic mail). The course is broadcast twice a week (three hours each time) for 12 weeks. Students in the region may watch the lectures at the broadcast time or they may record them for future viewing. Students living outside the broadcast area subscribe to a system that delivers the videotapes by regular mail every week. The course has been offered for three terms and has received favourable reviews by the students, several from many cities across Canada. Student feed-back indicates the need for a companion set of lecture notes. We are working on this and on a few other revisions necessary to update the technical material to comply with the 1995 version of the Canadian timber code.