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HOW TECHNICAL
COLLEGE COURSES BECOME SUCCESSFULL WEB-BASED E-LEARNING MODELS
THROUGH THE INTEGRATION OF RESEARCH, TEACHING AND COMMUNITY SERVICE
ACTIVITIES
Mohamed Aichouni 1 and
Soraya Benchicou 2
1
PhD,
Assistant Professor
2
MSc
in Mechanical Engineering and PhD Candidate
Paper Presented
at 4th International Forum on Engineering Education,
Integrating
Teaching & Research with Community Service -
IFEE2006,
25-27 April 2006, University of Sharjah, Sharjah , United Arab
Emirates
2. DEVELOPMENT
OF WEB-BASED COURSES TROUGH RESEARCH
2.1 BACKGROUND
AND MOTIVATIONS
The increasing
popularity of the Internet and its ability to provide seemingly
transparent communication between different computing platforms has
simplified the processes of providing learning opportunities to
learners. There is a growing maturity of learning management systems
(LMS) and an increased sophistication of the communication tools
within these systems. These have lead to a great awareness of the
ability to duplicate many teaching practices available in
face-to-face delivery by academic educators and vocational training
practitioners. Computer–mediated communication (CMC) is now used by
almost everyone in distance education training and comprises various
forms of electronic communication including synchronous chat, audio
and video and asynchronous conferencing, email, and file exchange.
Also, support for the use of discussion forums in distance education
is widespread.
As Muslim
educators following the teachings of our Prophet Mohammad, Peace be
upon him, and realising the power of ICTs and the potential of the
emerging e-Learning concepts to provide the right information to the
right people at the right times and places, we, a group of educators
at the Mechanical Technology Department launched a project to
develop web-based training programs. The aim was to develop and
disseminate multimedia training packages for engineering education
and vocational training students in the areas of Metrology, Quality
Control (Aichouni, [3] ), AutoCAD and Material Testing (Bedri [4,
5]). The purpose of these web-based courses was to improve the
quality of the training in engineering, to facilitate the access to
this training as well as to contribute to wider use of ICT in
engineering education and vocational training. It was an aim for the
group to find out how best to use these technologies as a way of
delivering courses and how the importance of other web tools such as
discussion forums, email, group projects and virtual chats to
influence the learning process among college students and to
contribute to better serve engineering and technical communities and
to dissiminate knowlegde in general. A through analysis of the
available litterature on e-Learning allowed us to adopt a building
model of the web-based courses based on the ADDIE model, which is
adopted from statistical process control (SPC) approach used in
quality improvement. ADDIE stands for Analysis, Design, Development,
Implementation and Evaluation. During the project these important
phases have been considered with a great care and careful
consideration. Quality measures and good practices in web-based
courses, described by Woolsey and Rodchua [6], have been adopted and
implemented in the courses.
In this paper we
mainly focus on the description of the metrology and quality control
web-based courses and their achievements in serving both academia
and community. It is worth noting here that these technical subjects
are of crutial importance in nowadays global economy driven by the
ISO 9000 Quality Assurance series and many other normative national
and international standards.
Metrology which is
the science of measurements, has a key position in the areas of
science, research, industrial production, testing and certification
and most obviously in product quality. Metrology`s results and
Quality features are widely present in the every aspects of our
daily life. Modern industries and organisations rely heavily on
measurements and metrology to produce high quality products and to
provide high quality services to their customers. Increasing
precision of measurements, more sophisticated methods and means,
continuing research as well as considerable amount of newly adopted
ISO normative standards lay high requirements on the qualification
and skills of persons working in all industrial and business areas.
Adequate knowledge in both Metrology and Quality Control is rather
necessary for industrial technicians, engineers and also managers in
almost all engineering fields and services (Mechanical,
Petrochemical, Electrical, Electronics, Defense, Food,
Pharmaceutical, Health, Trade, etc..).
2.2
METROLOGY AND
QUALITY CONTROL WEB-BASED COURSES
Our starting
point was based on a golden rule the research group believes on and
confirmed recently by Beal [2]. It states that any one can
build a web site through the use of usual Microsoft
applications (MicroSoft word, Front Page, Power Point, Excel, Mind
Jet). Beal showed that these basic applications which are available
on standard personal computers (PC) can be easily used to build
simple web sites for our students right from the scratch. This
simple and valuable rule, which we encourage every educator to adopt,
allowed the research group to build simple educational sites in very
important technical subjects and to post them to the net as
contribution to enhancing the quality of teaching and learning and
to the sharing of information and knowledge.
The
Metrology and the
Quality Control web-based courses described in this paper, have
been prepared in Arabic language; These web-based courses consist
mainly of multimedia courseware including theoretical
lectures, exercises, tests, laboratory reports, and supporting
modules, in hypertext form and power point presentations, supported
by graphical illustrations (including full color figures and
computer animations). Figures 1 and 2 show the main pages of the
two courses where the student can move to any subject through the
hyperlinks available. Interactivity has been added to the web
courses through different techniques:
-
Web
links to other educational sites (mainly to enhance the students
training on different measuring instruments such as micrometers
and Vernier Calipers and Quality tools)
-
Continuous exams posted to the web by the teacher: The student
has to work out the exam as home work and to submit it to his
teacher within the week.
-
Laboratory reports to be prepared by the student after each
training session according to a pre-designed model available on
the web site
-
An
email address has been provided to students to contact their
teacher and ask any question or make any comment about the
lectures or the training laboratory session.
Students were
encouraged to participate in technical discussion forums led by the
first author on both Metrology and Quality Control.
2.3 RESULTS
AND ACHIEVEMENTS
The web-based
couses described in this paper were designed mainly for educational
purposes at Hail Technical College and to enhance the training
process quality. As it will be shown in the next section, the
research group believes that this objective has been successfully
achieved. Another achievement added to the work was the fact that
these two courses are classified by the major search engines on the
web such as Google
at first positions. It is worth noting here that these two
courses were the only arabic educational courses available on the
web at the time of the preparation of the manuscript. A google
search on the general technical words for quality control (ضبط
الجودة)
and for metrology (القياسات)
would give typical results such as those presented on figures 3 and
4 where both sites are found 1st among 137.000 sites for
the Quality Control course and 1st and 2nd
among 107.000 sites for the metrology course. A careful examination
of the two figures shows that the sites are classified even before
the sites of official national and regional organisations of
standardisation in the Arab world and even before Arab higer
education institutions. The authors are proud of these achievements
which are believed to be the results of a successful integration of
academic research and teaching activities.
|
Click
on the links to see the image |
|
Figure 3.
The Google search showing 1st position out of
137.000 sites of the Quality Control web-based course (date
: February, 24, 2006) |
Figure 4.
The Google
search showing 1st and 2nd positions
out of 107.000 sites of the Metrology web-based course (date
: February, 16, 2006) |
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