This month’s Instructor Highlight is a just a few days behind, as it comes from one of our instructors at our partner CUNY in New York City who have been affected by Hurricane Sandy. Dakers- Thanks for taking the time during storm recovery to share with us.

Dakers Gowans has been teaching the BOC Level I course to energy managers and building operators working in New York City public buildings since 2009.  His learners work with agencies and non-profit organizations across the five boroughs including the Fire Department of New York, the Department of Sanitation, the Natural History Museum and the Department of Citywide Administrative Services.

Dakers brings over fifteen years of experience in the energy efficiency profession to the classroom.  He is President of Left Fork Energy, Inc., providing energy engineering consulting services and focusing on the planning, design, administration, and evaluation of rate-payer funded energy efficiency and demand response programs.

Dakers works with investor-owned utilities, public power authorities, public agencies and private corporations to develop energy and demand savings targets, and direct measurement and verification (M&V) and impact evaluation research to measure achieved savings.  In his free time, Dakers serves as a technical expert to the Department of Energy and the United Nations Convention on Climate Change where he is involved in the development of protocols and methodologies to measure energy savings and greenhouse gas emission reductions that result from energy efficiency projects.  This experience provides rich examples for use in the classroom with his students.

This fall, Dakers is the lead instructor in the roll-out of a blended version of the BOC-Level 1 program.  City University of New York (CUNY) subject matter experts spent much of 2012 preparing 50% of the course content for delivery as self-paced online modules.  The remaining 50% of BOC-Level 1 content continues to be delivered in a traditional classroom format.  The blended course initiative, led by Michael Bobker of the CUNY Building Performance Lab, was a response to requests from participants who asked for a more flexible learning program, as well as a response to participants’ supervisors who could not consistently release employees from their worksites for full days of training offsite.  (The CUNY instructional model calls for instruction to be delivered during the weekday, typically Fridays, while the employees are “on the clock”).

As an Adjunct Instructor with the CUNY School of Professional Studies, Dakers has enjoyed teaching the BOC content because it is so relevant to what the participants do in their buildings on a day-to-day basis.  He commented recently that “…the students are very engaged in the material because it gives them the skills and motivation to do what they know is right.”

If you are interested in courses at CUNY visit their Building Operator Certification site.