The teaching engagement with M.L. Campbell — an industrial wood-coatings company — began in 2020 and is ongoing as of 2026. Six years and counting, across four delivery modes: classroom instruction, hands-on practical labs, online sessions, and in-person training at customer sites.
The curriculum
The work covers industrial lacquer application, colour matching, product knowledge, and the application techniques that decide whether a finish lasts or fails. The audience is adult industrial learners — wood-finishing tradespeople, applicators, shop owners, plant staff. The stakes are concrete in a way that office training rarely is: a misapplied lacquer is a re-do, a re-do is hours of work and material loss.
What makes the partnership unusual is the range of modes. A two-hour classroom session, a five-hour practical lab, an online module a learner watches at their own pace, and a day at the customer’s shop walking through their actual product line — those are four different teaching disciplines, and holding them together for one curriculum is more demanding than any single mode in isolation.
The LMS course architecture being built today is the latest chapter of this same partnership — the in-person teaching encoded into something that scales beyond the classroom.