The Management of Industrial Forest Operations

The Management of Industrial Forest Operations (MIFO) is an on-line textbook and learning environment aimed at educating forestry and engineering students about the fundamentals of industrial forest operations management, as well as about the evolving state-of-the-art knowledge of the discipline. Contributors to the knowledge base of the MIFO are experienced educators, researchers and practitioners from the major forestry regions of the world. Updates will be made to the e-textbook on a regular basis, while the learning environment will evolve continuously. Multi-lingual versions of MIFO are planned for the future, with the organization of a Spanish version being furthest advanced.
As an e-textbook and learning community, the MIFO has these characteristics:
  • a customizable, evolving learning environment that reflects and reacts to what students want to know, what subjects are giving students the greatest difficulty;
  • the full use of hyperlinks to explanations, multimedia resources and external knowledge-bases and on-line resources;
  • interactive problems that teach fundamental knowledge and case studies that illustrate how these are put into practice in varying circumstances around the world;
  • collaborative, semi-automated Frequently-Asked-Questions (FAQ) and Ask-an-Expert sections;
  • the ability for all users to create private or shared annotations ("sticky notes&") in their own instance of the e-textbook.
Students will subscribe to the MIFO as individuals or as members of professor-moderated classes. Professors of subscribed classes will have access to:
  • a section for teaching tips and a forum for educators;
  • self-paced and professor-moderated tests;
  • a reporting mechanism that tells professors how well students are progressing and where they are having problems;
  • the ability to customize the class learning environment;
  • a private forum for their individual classes.
As well, downloadable, publish-on-demand, and eBook versions of the MIFO will available in the future.
The ultimate goal is to develop an evolving knowledge repository and a vibrant international learning community in the area of industrial forest operations management.