Windshield Debrief - We're All Instructors

One of the things that's been kind of front and center for me over the course of the last few weeks, I say course, pun intended, Through my teaching work at Joliet Junior College, one of the things that we are looking at in the CM program is potentially changing some of the courses from 16-week courses, which is our current semester, to eight-week courses.

Jim, the program coordinator, one of the things he's been kind of thinking about is How can we get content, how can we get coursework done by the students in the CM community faster? Ultimately, the goal of an education system is to educate the students so that they can then assimilate, become part of the working, the workforce, right? And in our case, industry, especially industries and everywhere, but industry, the construction industry right now, We need people.

We need people that can manage projects.

We need superintendents.

We need that construction management acumen in the workforce.

Certainly, it's a double-edged sword right now that not only are we beginning to lose technical professionals, people entering in on the technical side of things, but certainly the trades, the skilled labor that builds things, it's kind of this coalescing of loss because of other dynamics in the workforce.

So how can we help industry replenish the turnover, the attrition that's currently going up? So Jim's kind of thinking is, can we take some of our 16-week courses and turn them into eights? Is there a means of being able to take what maybe was a two-year program, typically, and be able to turn that into...

Maybe an 18 month, a year and a half program to be able to get students educated, get them trained, don't take away any of the education process of it.

The learning aspects of that still need to be accomplished, but how can we do it faster? I'm gonna be challenged in my construction surveying class, which is currently 16 weeks.

It's hands-on, making a transition to eight weeks.

And that's gonna be tough.

That's gonna be tough.

I know that Tim, the guy that was teaching the class before, one of the tough components he had was going through COVID where everything was remote.

How do you teach a hands-on course? How do you teach a lab course? And where that is a huge component of it, how do you do that virtually? So Tim had to work through and struggle with that.

For me now it's going to be taking 16 weeks of content, level work, total station work, GPS work.

How do you make that component condensed and do it in half the time? Part of that component will be hybrid, for those of us hybrid learning, work outside of the classroom that is more engaged through a virtual environment, which certainly is now in 2026.

I think everybody's kind of accustomed to it now, being able to learn online, being able to teach online.

How do I now transfer some of the content into more of a virtual outside the classroom setting so that the students can be working on modules and skills and different learning curriculum outside? And part of that is now me as an instructor needing to learn how to take advantage of that, how to do that.