Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century - Web-Based Engineering Education: Critical Design and Effective Tools - page 32

We can use the replaced lecture time to man-
age the online course and deal with queries.
The presentation would be varied without
too much change at once.
2. “ Why” not replace half the lectures with
a simple online resource, and run smaller
seminar groups in the time the lectures
would have used (obviously not practical
if you lecture to 200 students, but if you
online lecture to 40, this might give you a
chance to do something different with them
face to face. When all of a course's lectures,
readings, and assignments are placed online,
anyone with a computer and Internet access
can use online resources in the course from
any location, at any time of day or night.
One institutional goal of this movement
toward computer-aided education based on
online resources is to make higher education
more economical in the long run through an
“economy of scale.” If all of lectures, syllabi,
and assignments are digitized and put online,
tutors could spend less of their time teaching
a larger number of students, and fewer of
those students would be on campus using the
university's resources (Frances, et al., 1999).
According to the survey results conducted in
university of Wisconsin-Madison, the vast
majority of the students took advantage of
the fact that lectures were online to view
material in ways that are not possible with
live lectures. When asked if it was easier to
take notes to understand the material when
viewing lectures on electronic resources than
it would have been attending the same lecture
live, almost two thirds (64%) of students
agreed, either strongly (27%) or somewhat
(37%) (Foertsch, et al., 2002).

• A classical lecture is not the best way to

present materials any more.

• We have to demonstrate something visual

this is difficult for everyone to see in a
lecture.

• We have to work through a simulation or

case study which would be better done at a
student's own speed.

• We have to ask regular questions during

the presentation of content and we have to
monitor responses.

2. fundAmEntAL ASPEctS

There are a number of technologies whose inte-
gration into modern society has made dramatic
changes in social organization. These include
the Internet and its attendant promises of more
democratic information access and distribution,
including distance learning. A totally effective
education and training environment, when applied
to information technology instructional strategies
that are enhanced by the world-wide web, will
include factors that have long been identified as
contributing to an optimal and multi-dimensional
learning context - a personalized system of instruc-
tion (Wild, et al., 2002). The ingredients of such a
system have long been known to contribute to an
optimal learning environment for the individual
student (“Overview of e3L,” 2005).
Electronic based distance learning as a poten-
tial lever play a extraordinary role in the creation
and distribution of organizational knowledge
through the online delivery of information, com-
munication, education, and training (Wild, et al.,
2002). Numerous studies have been conducted
regarding the effectiveness of e-learning. To date,
there are only a few that argue that learning in
the online environment is not equal to or better
than traditional classroom instruction Web-based
also learning provides education access to many
non-traditional students, but if applied to replace

Online education of engineering students
requires more than “what” the transfer of the
knowledge and skills needed by the profession
because should always keep in mind that: