my lecture / course notes available to my students on CD-ROM or on a Web site. After the ... Lecturers should choose the best practices and use digital media exclusively. However, the ..... Winfiact followed by Photoshop create interesting and ...
IEE Education and Training Professional Group S5 -- 1st International Symposium on Engineering Education, Savoy Place, London. 4-5 Jan. 200 1 OIEE
Why not use digital media exclusively? Ian G. Kennedy, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg Abstract: The fast conversion to lgital media is a priority for Teaching, Learning and Assessment in Electrical Engineering Education (TL&A in EEE). Experience has shown that this approach has many advantages over conventional teaching methods. We modularize teaching material and use questions as titles in authoritative, attractive, engaging hypertext and post assignments on the Web, which students must submit by E-mail. Their response to the all-digital media is overwhelmingly positive. Leaming is motivated by the freshness of the material, supported by on-line links to Web or local references, and subsidiary material. The use of search engines to search the Web and local hard-drive is taught formally. Students are given a graduated series of assignments where they have to use digital bookmarking as a means of categorizing concepts, annotating findings, and organising Web and local material into a logical structure for publication on the Web and academic assessment. Posting on the Web encourages the quality of students’ work and the transparency of our assessment process. Institutes and industry should cooperate and take a proactive lead in sponsoring, commissioning, clearing copyright or intellectual property issues and in providing rewards to encourage works that build on the advantages of all-digital media. The paper asks and partially answers the questions “Why is Computer aided TL&A in EEE so important?”, “What can the Institutes and other role-players do to hasten the process?’ and “What does all-digital media mean for the industry?”
Key words: Just-In-Time Education, CAL, Hypertext Courseware, Digital Media, Digital Libraries, Instructional Assessment, Lifelong Learning, Distance Education, Open Learning, Courseware, Student Assignments, Leaming Community, Engineering Educators. 0
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‘‘Instruction is the deliberate organization and presentation of information with the end goal of promoting specific learning.”
“Education ... requires (us to make) inferences about intent, appropriateness and measurement of learning.” r2] “The (undergraduate) problem is the sheer number of students.” r3]
It is a pleasure to introduce the topic of Computer aided Teaching, Learning and Assessment (TL&A) in Electrical Engineering Education (EEE). The size of the pool of engineering knowledge is dependent on the effectiveness of the knowledge transfer process [41. I will emphasize the need to make the exclusive use of digital media one of our top priorities in education. Our next generation of students and our distance education students will all have
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0 2001 The Institution of Electrical Engineers. Printed and published by the IEE, Savoy Place, London WC2R OBL,UK.
computers at home and will require digital media. Digital media include the World Wide Web, E-mail, CD-ROMs,laptop computers with data projectors to lecture (and to assess student learning), replacing transparencies and other media. Digital media do allow mass education. "Solutions include virtual and video varsities, digital libraries and telecottages..."U
I would like to ask and answer three important questions: 1. Why is computer aided TL&A in EEE so important? 2. What can the Institutes and other role-players do to hasten the process?
3. What does it mean for the industry? First I must emphasize that humanness, group and lab work cannot be excluded fiom the teaching process. But we do need to move to more efficient media. As funds allow, I am advocating that we replace overhead transparencies with the more easily copied and ever cheaper digital media. Personally, I only lecture with a computer and data projector, and make copies of my lecture / course notes available to my students on CD-ROM or on a Web site. After the lectures they have my full course material to reinforce what has just been presented.
If we have to make an explanatory sketch or put a derivation on a white-board or a flip-chart, we use the digital camera to record the sketch or derivation and incorporate it in the digital version so that subsequent students can benefit fiom the explanation. Similarly, explanations on an overhead transparency film are scanned and stored. We post assignments for the students on the Web, and correspond with them by E-mail. Students do not have to make appointments to see us. They are also less inhibited in asking questions by E-mail. We then post their resulting work and marks on a Web site, for the extemal examiner to moderate. Finally we let the students know where they can see their own work and compare it with their peers' work. Students do appreciate the immediate feedback and openness of the process. Publishing the students' assignments on the Web encourages them to produce quality work.
1. Why is Computer aided TL&A in EEE so important? Elite systems are those which enrol up to fifteen per cent of the age group; mass systems are those enrolling between fifteen and forty per cent and universal systems are those which enrol more than forty percent U. The only way of us attaining mass education is through digital media. There are many advantages in using digital media exclusively. The World Wide Web is the new resource for material and course development. CD-ROMscan be duplicated at low cost. Lecturers should choose the best practices and use digital media exclusively. However, the presence of charismatic lecturers is still essential to enthuse students and help them to internalize the host of materials into useful reality. The role of lecturers remains to teach as effectively as possible, and get the learners yearning for more knowledge. We modularize the material into manageable chunks to facilitate learning, study and easy extension of the material and consistently use questions as headings to draw students into the
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material and give them focus for their learning. By giving each student a full set of notes of the best textbook standard, we permit students to progress at their individual paces. Through the use of hyperlinks to definitions we allow students with inadequate or different backgrounds to catch up without slowing the whole class down.
What are the advantages in exclusively using digital media in =&A? To me, the advantages of us using digital media are manifold: There is no impediment preventing us fiom easily updating our material. This is especially important in the fast changing fields. The approach also allows us to easily update and customize the course notes of other specialists. Using links to the World Wide Web allows the students to easily access supporting references and encourages them to further explore the topic. The use of hyperlinks allows us to subsume subsidiary material. This is also important because it allows us to prepare post-graduate, undergraduate and commercial / industrial versions of the material simultaneously.
Our weaker students can review the material at their convenience. We introduce colour and attractive fonts in the digital media at no cost, and enhance the students’learning experience. We can easily use programs to check for correct spelling or grammar, and use a text-tospeech program for final proofreading. We can easily incorporate illustrations, simulations, programs and interactivity.
Indexes to the content are easily produced automatically. (E3y using AltaVista Discovery, I have an electronic index to every word in my teaching material.) The Netscape Web browser is already a familiar interface for students to understand, and allows us to enlarge the text size at lecture time to allow for differences in lecture-hall venues and sizes. Because our students know that their assignments may be published on the World Wide Web, they take more care in preparing their assignments. The digital media approach dovetails with the assessment, setting, marking and extemal examination of assignments via E-mail. The approach harmonizes with a vision for our university to be the gZobaZ centre of excellence in the future delivery of world -wide education. The “Vision for a Virtual Varsity Network to bridge the info-gap” is an idea I advocate j3J. The vzrtuaZ varsity is a pool of co-operating tertiary educational institutions that agree to record and contribute a percentage of their best lectures to the pool. The key point is that if just ten centres are interconnected, and each contributes an average of just ten per cent of its core syllabi, then all
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of the core syllabi will be covered! There is a simple sign on a saucer of cents at the till of my local bookshop:
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‘If you have one, give one; if you need one, take t w o ’
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This attitude of sharing the knowledge of the info-rich to the info-poor is the one we can and The virtuaZ varsit).,is a consortium of cooperating higher education institutions should adopt that recognise each other’s strengths, credentials and credits. It relies on the interconnection of the institutions by means of a broadband network. The aim of the network is to allow the transmission of digital material between institutions. Of particular interest is the exchange of lectures between the institutions. Lecturing material is pooled and the presenter / facilitator / lecturer can now focus on the job at hand. In its simplest form, the h e s t lecturer in the world will lecture to the whole world. Lectures created at one institution would be transferred over the broadband network, and be used at all other institutions interested in receiving the lecture material. We assume that there is sufficient motivation for the institutions to agree upon the international standardizing of their lecture lengths etc. Because of the impossibility of synchronising student schedules on a global scale, most delivery would be delayed. So one configuration for the network would be for an institute to act as a hub with spokes out to the institutions.After the initial workload of creation, mere maintenance would be necessary to keep the material up to date. Staff will then have more time for improving their teaching, facilitation and doing research. Lifelong learning and continuing professional development could also tap into the repository.
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What do students think of the all-digital approach? Student response to the all-digital media is overwhelmingly positive. Feedback solicited (by Email) fiom some postgraduate students who attended a recent course follows: “Thumbs up for digital media teaching” Daniel Marule “If resources will be available, I will adopt your method when I go back home.... I would encourage you to continue with that [entirely digital] approach.” Tiwonge Kawonga
“On the matter of digital media for teaching, I believe strongly in the strengths of it.
* It reduces the time and complexity when communicating issues to a class as a central web site accessible fiom anywhere [and] is much easier than coming in to check notice boards etc. * The ease of carrying notes on a CD, and even not necessarily on a CD but really just logging onto a web site from anywhere in the world. I am starting to travel a lot and really appreciate it when I can get all the information and updates fiom wherever I am just using the Internet from work or even an Intemet cafk. * The ease of delivery of work and assignments that are already in electronic formats. I never saw the reasoning behind printing out electronic documents. Also with the advent of HTML converters, students can easily start harnessing the power of the browser which is standard on all computing devices thus issues such as compliance to a certain word
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processing program and also issues such as printer problems fall away. * The use of applicationsthat enhance the leaming experience by enabling quick lookup of keywords and also customising how you navigate through notes.... I hope the other courses also make the change soon as it can only mean the course [will be] easily accessible and really harness the power of the Web.” Aingharan (Kutty) Kanagaratnam
2. What can the Institutes and other role-players do to hasten the process? +
We recognise “One-to-one education is still best: one mother -- one child, one Roman tutor - one pupil, one English governess - one future queen. However, expensive expertise and the explosion of human knowledge make this approach impossible today. Why should expensive expertise be present when courses are given?’ [71 We are aware that today “we can now capture, encapsulate and update the expert knowledge of the industry in (internationally) networked, easily accessible (courseware).” J7J We invite the Institute and delegates to follow OUT lead r7]. 0
“An author divides up the material and presents it in units termed topics. This is in line with the didactic principle of presenting information in small, easily understood modules.”
“Graphics get (the) learner’s attention.” The use of graphics helps to give the student a sense of place. Also “we encourage the learner to explore the course by clicking on all linked words.” Hypertext courseware lets learners proceed at their own paces, following their own paths. Freedom in pace and path motivates learners, as feedback shows. 0
“Questions asked of consultants, and their answers form ideal material for exercises, as learners recognize them as being real-world problems.”
What are the best methods of providing Electrical Engineering Education in the future? The stance of this paper is that we must work entirely by electronic means, except of course for the physical work that our field requires students to do in the labs.
How do we ensure lifelong learning? We do not dampen curiosity. We provide the tools and show students how to do research at the earliest stage e.g. first year. To give an example, AltaVista Discovery, the hard-drive search program, reveals a key paper that categorizes the sub-fields of knowledge that we will have to cover, and extends our vocabulary list. We distinguish between the material that is relevant and that which is irrelevant to our present task. We evaluate and digitally bookmark the page so that we can later retum to it, to categorize bookmarks into digital folders (based on similarity with other bookmarks),
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annotate, sequence and organise by dragging and dropping the bookmarks and folders into the most logical positions. We click on the Discovery search-by-examplebutton to p r o g r m a t i c d l y extract the key words in the key page and we use the search engine again with these key words. This finds preliminary answers to some of our implicit research agendas: “Whereare the centres of excellence? and “Whereare the gaps? Repeating, we find a relevant thesis in a forgotten sub-directory, where other related files also await us to revisit, bookmark, annotate and organise them. We analyse, evaluate and draw conclusions then synthesize a draft, which we submit to the spelling and grammar checker to clean up. Again we click the search-by-example button to find like-minded Writings we can benefit fiom. Finally we polish our research using CD-ROMs, libraries and do experimental work. ”
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Why use questions? Questions force us to find answers. In making hypertext courseware for engineering education, the most important things are the “why” links. Imagine a Web in which, assiduously over the years, patient educators had filled in the “why” buttons with pointers to explanations
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It is important to encourage students to ask “why?”; not only to encourage scientific curiosity. They must leam they have a right to ask “why?” of rules, of anything that doesn’t seem right
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Students have to remember to ask “why?”. We can encourage this inquiry by making hypertext, which rewards it with quality answers W J.
How can we show the way without giving away the answers? We use livelinks. This is my term for bookmarked links to search engines that are fed the predetermined critical key words e.g. see http://traffic.ee.wits.ac.za/trafXc/pagel1.htm . On this page, resourceful “canned searches” yield searches via Altavista for: T e l e t r a f f i c NEAR Keyword.
In practice, how do we assess the progress of on-line learners? Students are given a graduated series of assignments where they e.g. have to use digital bookmarking as a means of categorizing concepts, annotating findings, and organising Web and local material into a logical structure for publication on the Web and assessment. Assessment is intended to confirmprogress rather than to sanctionfailure [101.Assessment is an especially important area, because the authenticity of student work cannot (always) be verified when assignments are uploaded [111. 0
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To ensure that ghost writers do not do the assignments, we establish rapport with students. We get to know the students as individuals. If we cannot do this in the lectureroom, we require the student to build a CV home page.
To prevent plagiarism and encourage students, we get each student to take ownership of . We a dzferent project. See for example http://traffic.ee.wits.ac.za/5007/students.htm check for plagiarism and unreferenced citations by ourselves submitting unique phrases fiom the student’s assignments to the search engines. At another university I have already caught a student attempting to submit a chapter for a final year report that he copied straight off the Web.
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We stay continually in contact e.g. via E-mail giving continuousfeedback. This implies that we first divide the field into sub-fields and then give out a series of small, interconnected assignments rather than one big one.
What practical programs do we use? Hypertext courseware is becoming widespread on the World Wide Web. The number and variety of applications are increasing and access is improving in speed and reliability. No longer is it necessary for the educator-author-artist to also be an expert in programming and HTML. Today the programs we use are AltaVista Discovery and Kenjin for hard-drive searches, AolPress for editing, WebCT for the administration and delivery of the course material and Netscape for the student’s access, E-mail and digital bookmarking. Talking Browser finds the difficult-to-see problems in the final proof reading. Winfiact followed by Photoshop create interesting and attractive illuminations to help the students from ”getting lost in cyber-space”.
What are the residual challenges? Some interesting challenges remain 0
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Residual challenges include the protection of intellectual property rights [121for internationally accessible courseware. We must not underestimate the time and effort required to rationalize, consolidate existing material and establish links in developing quality hypertext courseware r7].The process requires studying existing materials, new research and packaging the results in the most understandable form. Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery. Even one of my own hypertext courseware sites was once “reused” without aclmowledgement to my efforts and without my permission. We do need to protect our sources to encourage further development.
I propose that the Institutes cooperate here and take a proactive lead in commissioning work, clearing intellectual property issues and in providing rewards.
3. What does the all-digital medium mean for the industry? The use of the World Wide Web, E-mail, CD-ROMand data projectors allow us to lecture and assess student learning more efficiently, replacing transparencies and other media. We can also easily derive highly marketable, formal short courses for students in the industry or for informal part-time students who are keen on advancing themselves by self-education.
In the electrical engineering industry, the challenges of training and educating people include the ever-increasing training or education and travelling costs, large classrooms, high staff mobility, low staff availability and the high cost of technical expertise. “Suddenly there is a need for us to rethink our approach to providing modem education.’’ r7]A11-digital media are the cost-effective solution for delivering explicit and maybe even tacit knowledge. “Overall there are large savings. We can divide the costs over the many learners and libraries in the industry, country or world that benefit.” r7]
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We should, in the spirit of sharing knowledge, be willing to pool our talents. I am willing to trust my tried and tested, all-digital, quality, copyright, educational material to a global, shared pool. In retum I will fieely draw from the pool complementary material of similar quality to deliver to my students. We want to create an environment in which information is accessible to individuals and in which individuals acquire, share and use that information to develop their own knowledge and are encouraged and enabled to apply their knowledge for the benefit of the industry. As electrical engineers it is wise for us to switch to the exclusive use of digital media as fast as we can. Which institute will protect our rights and be the custodian of that global, digital repository?
References [13 Delivering Instruction on the World Wide Web. http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/-mcmanus/wbi.html##not
[2] W.J. Kolomyjec On Edutainment 15th Annual Symposium on Small Computers in the Arts held at the Ben Franklin Institute, Philadelphia Pennsylvania. November 2 - 5,1995 [3] Heard in the electrical engineering common-room [4] I.G. Kennedy. Educating Engineers in How to do Research Afiicon '92 Proceedings. New York: IEEE. IEEE Catalog No 92CH3215-1. ISBN 0-7803-0835-2.612-617 [SI I.G.Kennedy What is the solution to the infogap? First South Afiican Telecommunications, Networks and Applications Conference, SATNAC '98. Cape Town. 1998. http://traffic.ee.wits.ac.za/gap.htm
[6] P. Scott, The Meanings of Mass Higher Education, Open University 1995.2, citing M. Trow. 1973 Problems in the Transition$-omElite to Mass Higher Education, Berkeley CA. Camegie. Commission on Higher Education [7] I.G. Kennedy How to use hypertextfor courseware,Demonstration and poster session of paper. Hypertext '96, Washington. 1996. See also I.G. Kennedy TeletrafficLearning Using Hpertext 560-568 International Teletraffic Congress, Regional International Teletraffic Seminar, Pretoria. 4-8 Sept 1995
[8]T. Bemers-Lee. Style Guide for online hypertext. Educational hypertext http://www.w3 .org/Provider/Style/Educational.html1995 [9] Engines for Education: Natural Leaming http://www.ils.nwu.edu/-e for elnodesMODE-1pg.html [ 101 I.G. Kennedy What is the mentoring role of the supervisor?
http://www.wits.ac.za/supervise/l3/index.htm [ 113 L. Sherry & Morse, R. (1995). An assessment of training needs in the use of distance educationfor instruction. International Journal of Educational Telecommunications, 1(l), 5-22. Reprinted in Educational Technology Review, Winter 1996, No. 5, 10-17. Results http ://www.cudenver.edu/-lsherry/pubs/needs/results.html
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[12] U.S. Copyright Office. The DigitaIMilIenium Copyright Act of 1998. (DMCA) Title IV: Miscellaneous Provisions. Distance Education Study http ://www.loc.gov/copyn’ght/legislation/dmca.pdf
Acknowledgements Thanks are due to David Rubin for prompt help in improving an earlier version of the abstract and to other colleagues for feedback on the practice.
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