Towards developing successful residential schools for postgraduate programs for industry practitioners studying in flexible delivery mode

Residential Schools are conducted for each of the courses in the Maintenance Management Postgraduate Programs at Central Queensland University (CQU).A recent review of the programs has identified those residential schools that lack structure and do not provide a focussed learning experience result in disgruntled students. This is compounded as some students need to travel thousands of kilometres to attend and their organisations sacrifice their ready access to these individuals during the two day residential school.This paper discusses the possible benefits that could be realised from improvements of conducting residential schools for students, for staff, for the university and for the industry employers. As these schools are not compulsory it is the university’s responsibility to ensure that the investment of individual students and their organisation results in real-term benefits. The paper concludes with outlining strategies to achieve this.