Community Connections: Kings of the Road

« Washington Engineer - August 2006

Civil engineering profs put paving pedagogy online for a national audience

: Steve Muench (left) and Joe Mahoney are taking their paving expertise nationwide in the form of a new start-up company, Pavia Systems Inc.

• Browse the Pavia Web site
• Go to the UW TechTransfer Web site

When it comes to pavement, you might say Joe Mahoney and Steve Muench are kings of the road.

The two faculty members in the UW Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering can tell you the difference between Superpave and regular asphalt paving mixes. They can explain isolation joints, construction joints, load transfer and aggregate interlock. Between them, they’ve been teaching such concepts to students for more than three decades.

And now they’ve gone national via the Internet.

Mahoney and Muench, with the assistance of the UW Office of Technology Transfer, have launched Pavia Systems Inc., a start-up company that aims to bring convenient, online instruction in road building to the more than 54,000 companies around the country in the paving and construction industries.

“I think it’s often tough for the people in the industry to get the training,” said Muench, assistant professor of civil engineering and the person responsible for adapting Pavia’s content to the Web to make it accessible. “Around here the paving season runs roughly from April to October, and most of the contractors and big players are working pretty hard during that time to get the mix down and the road paved.”

An online system allows employees to cover the content when it fits their schedules, added Mahoney, professor of civil engineering. It also provides an easy means of tracking for trainers.

“You can track how every worker goes through the material,” Mahoney said. “If you take a test, it’s recorded. You can see exactly where each employee is. It’s very straightforward. We’re getting positive feedback from the training folks.”

The enterprise began in the 1980s when Mahoney started work on a document for the Washington State Department of Transportation called the pavement guide, a reference work covering the intricacies of paving. As an educator, he felt a traditional textbook format would be less than useful. Muench entered the picture as a doctoral candidate, and made Web applications and online pedagogy part of his doctoral program.

“We eventually took all of this massive content, and wrapped it into a Web browser,” Mahoney said. “We wanted to put it together in a way that it was easy to update and keep very relevant.”

The department used the results in offering an online master’s program in conjunction with the Department of Construction Management. The pair’s work won several awards – from the Transportation Research Board and the National Engineering Education Delivery System, as well as an R1.edu Award for online learning. With that experience, Mahoney said, he and Muench began thinking about taking the system and content into the private sector.

“Since this would be largely private sector training, it made sense to take it as an entity to the private sector,” Mahoney said. “So we licensed all the stuff from the university that’s related to what we want to do through UW TechTransfer, and they’ve been great.“

The company opened to a national audience last month, is in negotiations with several companies to deliver training for them and just signed a contract with a major equipment manufacturer to help with its online training. Si Katara, president of Pavia, said the future looks bright.

“The UW has been the leader in creating training content for the paving industry,” Katara said. “With the license we have from the UW, we’ve got a platform to create a tangible, practical impact on the asphalt industry.”