Grantee: The Masonry Society
Principle Investigators: Phil Samblanet
Year: 2020
Project Number: 2020.025
Status: COMPLETE
Education is a key pillar of the NCMA Foundation. The project aims to create a centralized ‘hub’ for online education of masonry for designers, educators, students, and more.
Program Details:
Increasingly, online education is being sought over traditional seminars and other in-person events. There are many reasons for this, which stretch back for a number of years as funding to attend, travel to, and time out of the office became common concerns for in-person training. Younger designers want more options for self-taught training and on-demand education. The recent pandemic has furthered both the desire and need for such virtual training.
To address these demands, The Masonry Society (TMS) is developing a Masonry Education Hub to provide a central location for educational offerings targeted primarily towards designers, educators (university professors and college faculty), students, and others for excellent and accessible education on a variety of masonry topics in a number of online formats (YouTube type videos, recorded Webinars, Night School class, University courses, etc.). The Masonry Education Hub will provide users of masonry systems a central system to learn more about masonry, find resources on masonry, and to track educational hours they may need for their own credentials.
This grant will also provide funding to start development of new content, called “Night Schools”. The first module would be general in nature and could be used by any and would cover Masonry Basics (or Masonry 101) in a series of training sessions. Common masonry materials, construction techniques, and properties would be addressed in this introduction to masonry, and would be of benefit to students, and those new to masonry. The second module would be focused on the Strength Design of Masonry and targeted towards Engineers in Training (EIT) to help them design masonry while also helping them prepare for their professional engineering and structural engineering examinations.