Given the last post on the MSC, I thought it might be worthwhile to talk a little about our course development priorities. It was clear that there is a problem with the existence of training resources in the measurement field, and LearningMeasure.com is trying to help alleviate that problem. Towards that end we need feedback on what is the most pressing need.
We want to hear what you think our training development priorities should be. We take all feedback very seriously. For instance we are currently working on a MIL-STD-461 testing training series because of feedback. Also being worked currently is the next course in our calculus series, and the first in a series on the C programming language.

We do have a list of courses we plan on developing as the site progresses. This list is expanding as more suggestions come in. We prioritize development first on those that get the most requests, second on what we consider vital to programs under development, and lastly courses that were developed primarily for LearningMeasure.com use. An example of the latter is our Perl programming courses, as LearningMeasure.com is primarily run by a series of Perl scripts. We feel that such courses may also be useful to others, so we add them to the catalog.

One can always suggest a course through our suggest a course website. Or one can comment on this post in a pinch.

There are of course suggestions we won’t act upon. For instance, I have received, surprisingly, several requests for a forklift training course. Sorry, that is highly unlikely, that is not our emphasis.

Also, existing courses are not meant to be static, but to be constantly improved and kept current, there is a comment mechanism for every page on a course. In the upper left corner of each course page is a icon which when clicked opens up a form at the bottom of the page. In that form one can make a comment on the page, ask a question about the course, or suggest further material that could be added to the course. The input is anonymous, unless one inputs an email address. If one asks a question, and wants an answer, one should enter their email address so that we can contact them.

Finally if you are a consultant or vendor, we would gladly use material that you would give us to be added as a course or part of a course. The material would be edited, and you would have to agree to give up rights to the material, but in exchange we will allow a one page advertisement for you and/or your company in the course, as well as links in other publicly available sections of our website.Current topics under consideration for future course development that are not currently areas that courses are being development on are

• Basic physics courses
• Electromagnetics
• Safety Courses
• Systems Engineering

These are just examples, but we would like to hear from you. We have a plan for what courses we will develop next that will at least take several months to complete. We want to maintain an emphasis on measurement, test, and metrology; but that might include background on why some measurements are made, or some of the foundational material, which is why we are thinking of adding basic physics courses. Let us know what your thoughts are. We want to provide a service that will be of the most use to our customers.

Just last week I attended the Measurement Science Conference (MSC). It was fairly interesting, although many of the engineers and technicians that I know were not in attendance. It may have been the economic times, but I had the impression that the conference had more management than usual.

There was an estimate that I heard that the number of people in the metrology community in the United States was approximately 30,000 people. The number of people involved with measurement, test, instrumentation, verification, and validation is significantly larger than this, yet these 30,000 individuals are absolutely vital for everyone in those fields and for the economy as a whole. A measurement of any kind can not have any value if it is not traceable back to agreed upon standards, and that is what metrology is about.

The main thing I took away from this conference is that the average age of the metrology community is near that of retirement age, and that there is insufficient educational resources and succession planning in place to replace those who will retire soon. Of course LearningMeasure.com is trying to do something about that by creating training material that can be used within existing training programs or as stand alone training.

The same issue exists in the measurement community at large, but not as severe. LearningMeasure.com’s courses clearly are aimed at this community as well.

There were a fair number of technical presentations at the conference, and some of them pointed out needs in the community that will lead to future course development here. In particular one example of the things I took away was the need for a course in grounding of measurement systems. I am looking forward to reading the papers for the presentations from sessions I didn’t attend.

I asked if I could take videos of the conference for the podcast, and do interviews on the exhibit floor, but the organizers said not this year, but next year they may allow it, so I will hopefully be back next year and be able to do podcasts from the conference. I did however get a number of people to agree to being interviewed on the podcast this next year, so I am looking forward to that. I met a lot of new people, and generally had a good time at the conference.