BLACKSBURG, VA, April 15, 2002 – Teaching tools utilizing new technology will soon be rated by a five star system—just like the movies—as a virtual community of educators works on improving engineering education methods.
This project is aimed at improving teaching by creating an active virtual community of engineering educators who contribute to a common collection of courseware materials. The group, with 26 members from such schools as Virginia Tech, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Illinois, and California State University at Sacramento, will develop and evaluate new instructional materials. The teaching methods and new software that are rated as most effective will earn five stars and be available in digital libraries on the Internet as a resource for educators.
Joe Tront, Virginia Tech professor of electrical and computer engineering, is the lead researcher for the project. He has been awarded $500,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to examine the characteristics of learning resources that encourage their use by faculty members. Tront and his colleagues will also study the types of training and support services digital libraries should offer to best assist faculty members in making efficient use of digital learning resources.
Instructional technology allows for new ways of learning, such as courses on the Web and collaborative communication. "Educators around the country and the world are developing technology-based materials to support their courses," Tront said. "We plan to bring these materials together in a unified format so that they may address a common set of learning goals," he added.
The potential benefits of instructional technology include: addressing multiple learning styles; promoting active learning; interactivity; scaffolding learning (providing a supportive structure for learning); geography-independent collaborative learning; enhancing visualization; and extending the reach of a typical course.
Teachers encounter a variety of problems when trying to create and implement new learning methods, including a shortage of required resources. Many of the new digital learning materials do not include instructor's guides or training materials. Learning resources need to match teaching goals, but it is not always obvious which resource best serves a particular course. "Because anyone and everyone can be a publisher on the Internet, educators and students are experiencing an overload of information coupled with materials of a widely varying quality," said Tront. Sometimes the use of new instructional methods is also hampered by a lack of proper equipment in the classroom.
Another problem is that the faculty reward system does not emphasize the use of improved teaching methods. New teaching materials are time-consuming and costly for teachers to develop. There is little incentive for re-use of the materials so teachers sometime duplicate efforts unnecessarily.
One of the project's major goals is to provide teachers with resources that are easier to locate and identify as the most appropriate resource for their courses. This information will be available in digital libraries, such as NEEDS (http://www.needs.org), a digital library for engineering education. A rigorous peer review of the teaching materials contributed to the collection posted on the Internet will help encourage the reward system to recognize teachers who develop and use new instructional technology.
The efforts of the virtual community will work towards solving the multiple challenges related to the development and use of high quality courseware. For more information, please contact Joe Tront at: jgtront@vt.edu.
PR CONTACT: Karen Gilbert, 540-231-4787 or karenise@vt.edu
Dr. Tront can be reached at 540-231-5067 or jgtront@vt.edu