Part of the mandate of the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario (Ministry) is to maintain the existing highway infrastructure, not just to build new highways. To manage the maintenance of the highways several departments are involved; The Geotechnical Engineering Office (Geotech) evaluates the non-destructive and destructive testing of the highway, The Construction Engineering Office (Construction) inspects the ride-ability and surface of the highway, the Program Planning office sets the budget for repairs, the Traffic Engineering Office (Traffic) dictates construction times, the Materials Engineering and Research Office (MERO) sets the mix designs, writes the specifications and recommends repair methods and the Planning and Design Department (P&D) oversees the whole project.
Another part of the Ministry’s mandate is continuous education; the goal is to maintain quality work. To meet this mandate project engineers are encouraged to attend workshops to improve their various skills. Typically the project engineers at the Ministry have been working for their respective department their entire engineering career. Therefore these engineers of their respective departments do not know what the engineers do in other departments. For instance, and how it relates to highway maintenance, a geotechnical project engineer may understand how to read the results from the tests done to the pavement surface but may not understand how MERO selects the mix design and strength for a suggested repair area.
Therefore the goal of this workshop is to give the project engineers of the involved six offices, as mentioned above, a high-level summary of what each of the offices does with respect to highway maintenance. The objective for the author is to create a course for the Ministry that introduces the project engineers to the practical and theoretical aspects of highway maintenance. This course would also be practical for new engineers starting at the Ministry, but also applicable for other jurisdictions, such as the Municipal Governments (i.e. The City of Toronto) and the Federal Government.
This workshop will be taught over one and half days; a half-day visiting a highway maintenance construction site and the remaining one-day will be a workshop indoors in a Ministry classroom. The classroom setting is ideal to accommodate the approximately 50 people that will be attending the lecture and the chosen presentation method. The site visit will be a visual, intuitive setting and the workshop will combine visual and verbal learning along with active student involvement by combining lecture slides with group activities. The learning styles of the students will vary so the goal for the instructor is to present the material to appeal to the different learning styles. The material presented in the classroom will be sequential but the site visit will appeal to the global learners.
The objective of the course is only to provide the project engineers with a high-level summary, therefore the students will be required to specify what the various departments do, but not to synthesize or evaluate the methods used by the other offices. The project engineers are civil servants, which brings a human dimension, to the project. Therefore the content was chosen to appeal both to the cognitive and the emotional.
The content will be divided into seven parts. The first section is the site visit and will be the longest in duration. The remaining will be in class workshops each lasting 50 to 55 minutes covering what is involved with the six offices and a summary workshop. The summary workshop will tie what was taught in the six other presentations together and will allow time for course evaluations.
By the conclusion of the six workshops the students will be able to do the following for each office:
- Construction: identify what construction engineers are looking for at a site visit and how they conduct the site visit, the criteria for a ‘ride-ability’ assessment and what test that are used to evaluate the highway
- Geotech: specify the evaluation process for the destructive and non-destructive tests of a highway and identify the criteria for replacing or repairing sections of the highway
- MERO: specify the repair and replacement methods that the Ministry uses and specify concrete mix designs and strengths
- Traffic: explain the methods that are used to assess the highway traffic patterns, specify the modeling software used for highway closures and identify acceptable speeds and queue times
- Program Planning: identify typical budget allocations, as well as budget restrictions and limitations
- P&D: identify the course of action that is used to start the investigation process and identify the necessary items to deliver a contract package
The workshop will demonstrate that this process is iterative. P&D is constantly evaluating the highways ensuring that the users are satisfied and starting this cycle of involving the various departments when the highways no longer meet the needs of the users.
The goal of this course is not like that of an undergraduate course, to pass or fail students; instead the goal is to expand the knowledge of highway maintenance for project engineers at the Ministry. Using Kirkpatrick’s Hierarchical Model of Teaching Evaluation provides a summative method to measure the benefits to the course. Using this approach the instructor can then modify the workshop to better meet the needs of the students.
Tied together with the workshop there will be a website that has all the workshop material along with other readings, websites, and examples for the project engineers to refer to. The Ministry uses ‘Sharepoint,’ a website that has discussion boards and interactive capabilities. Although there will be no formal mentoring, mentoring relationships may evolve. The human dimension of Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning plays a role in the civil service, thus informal mentoring relationships may be formed by project engineers seeking to broaden their engineering knowledge.
The objective is not to make the project engineers experts in all six disciplines. Instead the goal of the workshop is to provide the skeleton framework of what the various offices do to improve maintenance project efficiency.
