Introductory post from the interim chairman

Hello, my name is Kent McCoy and I've been a registered landscape architect for over 40 years. Wow! makes me tired just thinking about it. I won't bore you with all of my adventures because that's not the reason I'm talking to you today and besides you can see all that on my personal web.


I and a small group of like minded folks have put together what we hope will be a frank and lively exchange of views and ideas about how to improve on the quality of continuing education for Florida's registered landscape architects.


Unless you've been in deep space, you have had to notice several phenomena developing over the last few years that are greatly impacting  lifestyle, bottom line and future prospects for succeeding in this great industry we all love so dearly. Specifically I refer to:

• An ongoing economic calamity only rivaled by the great depression some 80 years ago which has left an estimated third of our profession either unemployed or barely ticking over. This reality has put huge cost pressures on both landscape architects and their industry pardners causing them to re prioritize many aspects of their lives in an unprecedented way in order to survive. In other words thousands of individuals in this business are staying up nights desperately searching for ways to cut any scrap of fat out of their lives without getting to the bone.(a lot easier said than done as you well know!)
• A revolution in mass communications unlike anything we have seen in the past hundred years. The Internet eclipses all forms of past advancements in communications, making the telephone, telegraph, radio and television look like children's toys. Which in reality is exactly what they were compared to the nearly incomprehensible way we now interact with one another across the globe in milliseconds.
  Incredible opportunities to dramatically advance the human condition abound on every street corner, particularly in miracle hubs like  Silicon Valley.
• An epic transformation of the workplace that is dramatically changing forever the nature and magnitude of essential skill sets essential for economic survival. An example we here could all relate to would be a young graduate going to a job interview tomorrow with a T square, slide rule, rapid-o-graph pen set, non graphing calculator, and hand drawn sketches of his best creations to date. When asked about his cad prowess, gis/esri background, blog-web savy, sketchup samples, leed quals, etc, he just sat there dumb founded. Hopefully this little analogy will dramatize how compelling continuing education is to personal survival in the work place of today and one can only wonder what the lad would need next year to get the same job!!
  FBOLA (Fla Board of Landscape Architecture) has a solemn obligation to present and future Florida landscape architects to fully utilize every shred of new technology available to accelerate and enhance job skills in a cut throat international environment that will only get a lot worse.

A recent pole we conducted among existing and potential providers, landscape architects, academics and our own extensive knowledge of the situation  clearly demonstrated that the current environment at FBOLA is simply not nearly good enough for ALL registered landscape architects to realistically access the current 420 approved courses now shown on the FBOLA site. We make this statement based on the following major flaws ,we and many other concerned participants have consistently observed:

• Over 80% of the approved courses are not available online on a 24/7--365 day basis as they should be. Most of the courses are available on a sometime basis in a classroom or office, generally hundred of miles away involving expensive travel , lodging and meals, not to mention often outrageous fees associated with generally mediocre material everyone has seen before anyway.
• Nearly half of the courses require some kind of professional affiliation for access,  never mind whether their online or not. All of these professional associations are expensive to keep up. The ASLA for example charges a whopping $400 annual fee for national and state dues which enables you to access whatever approved courses FBOLA may offer. A kind of Troll under the bridge, gottcha setup if ever there was one.
• The only expedient route for an accumulation of 16 hours is to take a "package" deal from one of the FPDL's (For Profit Distance Learners). This will set you back another $600 on top of association dues ($400) lost time at $100/hr to take the whole 16hr package ($800)--Well now your out $1600 alone (if you've got it in the first place) just to get in the front door of FBOLA not to mention the $305 license fee for FBOLA every 2 years. "Hey Honey, can we mortgage the kids to stay licensed this year?"or what.
• Many existing, and even worse potential new breed, providers complained to no end about the needless red tape associated with getting accepted and maintaing a course schedule on FBOLA. We had personal conversations with potential providers like Ron Blank and AEC Daily, Autocad and they told us the same scary tale of why they avoided FBOLA and favored other licensing boards to get involved with.

Please have a look at the 19 page report we have put together outlining what we think are very serious problems and what possible solutions may be out there. We don't pretend to have it all right (or wrong) in our evaluation but we feel it is a first stab at the morass called the continuing education swamp in Florida.


On draining the continuing education swamp for Florida registered landscape architects. pdf