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CASE STUDY


2011 ranges from £6,000 to £6,500, while the Professional Diploma is £9,250 and the Professional Doctorate £2,650/ year. Although costs are higher than the typical £4,500 being charged in 2011 by other universities for MSc courses, the fee at CAT includes eight weeks of full board accommodation, and gives access to the unique learning environment at their site. Short courses cost from £50 for the ‘taster days’ to £950 for the longer installer courses. While some courses are fixed price, many of them offer a 40% discount for concessions, and all courses longer than a single day include all food and accommodation.


How are the courses delivered? Short courses run over up to six consecutive days, while the postgraduate courses take up to two years, with students taking eight modules from a wider choice of different subjects. The modules are delivered for one week each month, and the students are also required to write a dissertation based on their own research in their final semester. The MSc courses can be studied part-time, and the architecture course by distance learning, although this means missing out on the practical elements of the course.


Each module on the MSc courses lasts one week, and one day of the week is set aside for practical work to build upon the theoretical learning already completed. All courses at CAT are intensive in nature, with students living on site for the duration of the teaching sections of the course, allowing them to share ideas and discuss what they’ve learned with each other. This immersion in the subject being studied is one of the characteristics that helps CAT students come away with an infectious enthusiasm for the subject and sustainability in general, and the ability to put their ideas into practice.


The recently completed WISE (Wales Institute for Sustainable Education) building at CAT is crucial to the (MSc) postgraduate courses. Not only does it house a 200-seat lecture theatre, laboratories, offices and a dining area, it also provides accommodation for students, and is an example of what can be achieved by putting into practice the subjects that are being studied within it. The building is designed to require minimal heating and lighting, using passive ventilation, solar gain, daylighting, thermal mass and high levels of insulation. Solar water heating and a biomass boiler supply heat, and both heat and electricity are individually metered in all rooms in the building, creating a valuable dataset that students can use to evaluate the building’s performance.


Environmental benefits The direct environmental benefits of CAT’s education work are related to the sustainable buildings in which students live and study, but the indirect benefits are much more significant. CAT is training and educating people to work in the many roles required to put the UK on a sustainable energy footing, and doing so in increasing numbers. It is also receiving groups of students from other universities for short visits so that their expertise can be shared more widely. Students and trainees do not just leave CAT with knowledge and experience though – they also tend to acquire an enthusiasm for sustainability that prompts them to take action and encourage others to do the same, further multiplying the benefits CAT’s work has. Other indirect benefits to come out of CAT’s educational work have resulted from student research projects. The bulk of the Zero Carbon Britain report was based on the work of students, and the recently updated version, Zero Carbon Britain 2030, has already been influential in the UK, with government ministers taking an interest in it.


Future plans In 2011 CAT launched a new MSc course, MSc Environmental Change and Practice: Buildings, and is working to increase student numbers on all of its courses.


|176| ENVIRONMENT INDUSTRY MAGAZINE


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