[Sticky] Professors: Share basic information about your wood class!

At Colorado School of Mines, we have one wood design class as a Technical Elective (not mandatary for our degree). It is typically taken by Structural focused undergrad students who want to go into design world.

This class just covers basics including NDS member and connection design, and some SPDWS simple design.

This class used to be "Timber and Masonry Design", but I separated Masonry out with the argument that we need more time to cover new trends in timber design, which is mass timber. 😎 

Contemplating about a Graduate level "Advanced timber design" class but have not get to it yet...

At University of South Alabama, Timber Design have been offered every other Spring semester as a technical elective for structural focus civil engineering at both under-graduated and graduated levels. This course covers the design of timber structures, including design loads, structural behavior, properties and grades of wood, design of beams, columns, diaphragms, shear-walls, structural glued laminated timber, and structural connections. Timber design using Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) will be introduced in the coming years. Design codes and specifications follow National Design Specification-NDS (American Wood Council) and Engineering Wood Association-APA. 

@trungdo How large is your class typically? 😎

Our class size is ranging from 5 - 25 students, typical size is 10-15 students

UBC currently offers an undergradute timber design course CIVL439 Design of timber structures (~40 students) and a graduate course CIVL517 Advanced topics in timber structures (15 students). CIVL 439 covers mostly member design and connection design in CSA O86, shear wall and diaphragm design of light wood frame systems. CIVL517 covers mostly mass timber design, high capacity connections out of CSA O86, innovative seismic design such as balloon-type walls, post-tensioned rocking frames and walls, glulam frames braced by BRBs, etc. 

@minghao-li are those required classes for the degree?

@ling I know both courses are electives, and not required for their degree.

@jianhuizhou I see. I have yet to find anywhere wood is a required class, if not even UBC, then... 

The University of Kansas offers CE 768 Timber Design. Wood and timber design often get confused but our class is a graduate level class that goes through the AWC NDS and examines both theory and practice. This course is intended for structural engineers that plan to research wood or structural engineers that plan to design wood buildings in the private sector. The class is offered online in real time with two way student-professor interaction.

@billkirkham Hi Bill, nice to see you here. So this class is a grad class. Does it require students to have taken an undergrad wood design class before? Or it can be taken by students with 0 experience in timber?

I had thought KU has an undergrad wood class... but I might be wrong.