Dear Ground Improvement professionals and experts, I wanted to invite you to participate in a new educational initiative here at the University of Michigan: I am the instructor of CEE 542, a graduate level course on ?Soil and Site Improvement?. As part of the course, students typically select a topic of their interest and study the literature in more depth, then prepare a class project report to me (the instructor), and make a presentation. This year, instead of having this ?conventional? deliverables, students worked in teams and submitted their project online so that it is available to all practitioners and researchers to review (in addition to the instructor). The motivation behind this initiative is that by ?opening the classroom the Profession? through this class project, students are more excited to work on their project, the class becomes more appealing, and overall students learn better. I have tried this once before for a different course and it seems that this is the case (and we are investigating this further). I wanted to invite you and your committee members to review the student class projects on ?Select Topics on Ground Improvement?. The class projects are available here: http://www.geoengineer.org/education/web-based-class-projects/select-topics-in-ground-improvement . Scroll down to see the list of projects and click on the topic of your interest. Once you have selected the project, you can review the table of contents for that project at the right side of your screen. If you prefer, you can click ?See entire project? you will view their entire report as one document, instead of each section of their report separately. Each project has an ?Add a comment? box at the bottom that allows you to provide comments. If you provide any technical, editorial or other comments during the next two weeks, i.e., by Wednesday 23rd of April, students will be required to respond to them and incorporate the necessary changes to their project. They will then finalize their project. The web-based reports will remain online indefinitely as useful technical content for geotechnical engineering professionals and students worldwide. I am sure students will be very excited to have lots of viewers of their projects, as well as comments, feedback and questions, so I wanted to encourage you to participate. Also, for your information, the web-based platform that is used was developed by Geoengineer.org with partial funding from the ASCE Geo-Institute http://www.geoengineer.org/education/web-based-class-projects . If you are an educator and you have an interest in using this platform at no cost as part of your classes, or if you also have any additional feedback for future improvements of the platform, please contact me. Also, please forward this e-mail to any colleagues that you think may be interested in participating, particularly professionals. Best, Dimitrios __________________________ Dimitrios Zekkos, Ph.D., P.E. http://www.dimitrioszekkos.org Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA Managing Director, Geoengineer.org, The International Information Center for Geoprofessionals http://www.geoengineer.org __________________________