Web-Based Training - Web-Based Engineering Education: Critical Design and Effective Tools - page 191

these projects is teaching and learning by distance
instructions. The central focus is the specification
of event-oriented lessons and seminars such as
computer supported role-plays for distributed
problem-solving, gaming in an open environment
and multinational web-based teaching, where
students will learn to work on open problems in
different fields of engineering, having an active
connection with other universities and also the
manufacturers. They will be guided from theo-
retical learning in lessons via interdisciplinary
distributed games to international teamwork in
cooperation with partner universities. Step by
step, their capabilities and entrepreneurial spirit
to apply theoretical knowledge will increase, as
well as their social and managerial skills. This
approach takes up the idea of e-learning to en-
hance traditional more or less passive reception of
knowledge by students what we know as learning
by listening, towards an active, self-directed learn-
ing and cooperative knowledge creation learning
by trying (Hirsch 1998; Pyrz 2003; Baker 2005;
Grunbacher 2007).
Concerning to the necessities of modern life,
engineering education requires essential transi-
tions in methods and tools to accord with modern
societies. So that, engineering education design-
ers endeavor to design and to employ the most
consistent methods which fulfill this purpose.
As a potent approach web-based training
technique is one of the modern methods of dis-
tance learning which plays an advancing role in
every field of education. It can be applied solely
or joined with the traditional education systems.

the information achieved by all of the CERN re-
searchers. Rather than presenting information in
a linear or hierarchical fashion, hypertext permits
information to be linked in a web-like structure.
The tool provided a way to link textual information
on different computers and created by different
scientists. Nodes of information could be linked to
other nodes of information in multiple ways. As a
result, users can dynamically interlace the informa-
tion in order to make them most convenient. The
CERN project resulted in an innovative front-end
to the Internet, now called the World-Wide Web
(WWW) (Gottschalk 2009).
For educators, the internet and HTML have
provided a new occasion for distance training. The
ability of putting together graphics, text, sound,
animations and movies into a single tool has em-
powered the educators to build virtual classroom
on their WebPages. By this mean the organizations
or individuals can create their own home pages
and link them to other home pages or share them
with other computers. The educational home pages
can be supported by virtual laboratories, virtual
libraries, text lessons, virtual classrooms using
video conferencing, exercises and exams. These
are all the body builders of web-based training.
As a simple definition, Web Based Training
(WBT) is a form of training that can be developed
by utilizing a network. Web Based Training is the
Delivery of educational content via a Web browser
over the public Internet, a private intranet, or an
extranet. Web-based training often provides links
to other learning resources such as references,
e-mail, bulletin boards, and discussion groups.
WBT also may include a facilitator who can
provide course guidelines, manage discussion
boards, deliver lectures, and so forth. When used
with a facilitator, WBT offers some advantages
of instructor-led training while also retaining the
advantages of computer-based training' (Imperial-
College-London 2009).
WBT is the innovative approach to distance
learning in which training material is transformed
by the technologies and attitudes of the internet and

5. WEB-BASEd trAInIng

In order to overcome the problems of incompat-
ibility and employ a new way of linking made
possible by computers, called hypertext, a group
of scientists at the European Laboratory for Par-
ticle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland,
began developing an Internet tool in 1989 to link