Postgraduate courses take flexible format

A Technology Innovation Centre product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team May 5, 2006

To help engineers and technologists advance their careers, UCE Birmingham's Technology Innovation Centre is launching new, flexible-learning postgraduate schemes.

To help engineers and technologists advance their careers, UCE Birmingham's Technology Innovation Centre (TIC) is launching new, flexible-learning postgraduate schemes.

Working technologists or engineers with first degrees can feel excluded from being able to develop their careers through busy job and family commitments.

TIC's progressive, new approach is aimed at making part-time study for valuable, postgraduate, business qualifications more convenient and accessible.

As lead-academy for Cisco Systems covering Europe, Middle East and Africa, TIC is able to use to the latest technologies to enhance the mature student's study experience and strengthen the skills of Midlands businesses.

Using an established distance-learning platform, to structure and interactively communicate e-learning course content, TIC will enable part-time postgraduate students to study eight valuable business disciplines at their own convenience.

TIC's innovative, flexible approach will help students advance their knowledge through blending accessible, online, remote support by tutors with periodic face-to-face tuition.

Mike Wilkes, TIC Associate Director whose division is introducing the new flexible-learning studies, comments: "In accordance with the recently published Government review by Sir George Cox, TIC aims to be a centre of excellence which combines technology and business teaching".

"In a fiercely competitive global market place, UK businesses need staff with management skills which will help them develop strong positions".

TIC's blended programme will concentrate initially on the MSc in logistics.

However, the programme will be extended to include supply chain management, e-commerce and project management, as well as quality and management of manufacturing systems.

The new flexible, part-time, postgraduate studies, aim to build on the foundational technologies in which TIC is already rated as a leading UK faculty.

Clare Jones is the TIC senior lecturer involved in developing the new approach.

She emphasises that the primary concern is to ensure the student's learning experience is of the same quality and value as those on conventional part-time postgraduate courses.

The technologies in which TIC is involved, through its leading Cisco and Microsoft academy status, have enabled it to take a leading position in the flexible-learning field.

Students on the new courses will see techniques such as pod-casting used for the first time in this field of education, to enable remote tutorial exchange.

Clare Jones says: "We want to ensure students feel connected despite being remote from one another for much of the course".

"We do this through TIC's leading position in collaborative technologies such as that used in Microsoft's Groove system".