Internet Based Engineering Teaching Modules

Abstract

Internet based university level courses are available in many university web sites around the world, but access to most of these web sites are restricted to students who are registered for that course in that university and has no free access to others. Therefore, to provide online education through such courses for students in Sri Lanka and to obtain the wealth of other relevant information and resources available on internet, this research project has been initiated. As the first step, undergraduate level engineering materials and structural engineering courses have been selected and are developed in this project. These courses contain multimedia (text, graphics, sounds, videos etc.) presentation of the subject material and web links to various related web sites available on the internet and examples and online problems to work on. These course materials are developed using HTML and JAVA languages. These courses will be available soon on the university ofPeradeniya web server. A person having a computer with an internet connection and an internet web browser will be able to access this web site from anywhere around the world. In a long run these kinds of "internet based university courses" will replace the traditional class room teaching and universities may overcome class room seating capacity barriers and may be able to cater large number of students around the clock. Even if a staff member is not available in the university to teach a course, still the course can be offered by the university when it is available on the university web site and may be a good way to tackle the staff shortages in many universities around the world. Home page of the web site of "Engineering Materials" course is shown in Figure 1. These web based teaching modules will be periodically updated based on the comments received by various people and with the development of the subject and internet.

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