Professor of JOLLIES
Synopsis
John, Professor of Mechatronic Engineering, is a firm believer in keeping it simple. His virtual laboratory experiments are fun and easy to use.
Description
John relies on CWIS (Campus-Wide Information System), rather than more expensive and high-tech programs, to provide his courseware. In addition, he produces simple demonstrations of engineering principles through JavaScript. For example, at John's website www.jollies.com (JavaScript On-Line Learning Interactive Environment for Simulation), students can download pages containing demonstrations and panels of JavaScript programming code. These can be edited on-screen by typing in the box, so the students can enter variables; the result is an animated image moving in an accurate, ‘real-world' way. These simulated laboratory experiments are demonstrations of dynamic systems, operating in real time. John's aim throughout has been to keep everything as simple as possible and to keep file sizes very small.
Target audience
John uses these pages and similar applications on courses ENG 3905 (Mechatronic Practice), ENG 8001 (Engineering and Surveying Research Methodology) and ENG 4406 (Robotics and Machine Vision). The student numbers vary from about 15 to about 50 students on each of these.
Learning goals and objectives
John's pedagogic principle is to make difficult things look easy, rather than the other way around. He tries to make these interactive virtual experiments fun, interesting and easy to use, bearing in mind that many students may have to use unreliable dial-up connections and cannot necessarily access larger files.
Who did/does what?
John created the applications and the websites he uses. He finds that, by using his own sites, he remains in control of his own course materials and can edit and update as he sees fit.
Results
John has been continually up-dating and refining his materials, both to allow for improvement and also to take into account technological changes, such as the appearance of new features and new browsers.
Problems and advice for others
John's advice to others is to be aware of the file sizes that are being used. He says that with this awareness, a lot can be crammed in to a small space – this is especially important for students who have to rely on dial-up connections.
General recommendations
John would like to see the development of courseware through style-sheets being made available to all staff so that they can create their own web-pages with ease and use the same materials in other ways, such as in print, in displays for classroom presentations, and so on, all from the same source document.
He'd also like to see courses offered to staff in basic web literacy as way of encouraging lecturers to have their own web-pages.
Additional comments
John says that there are many low technology solutions to the problems which he believes the decisions to buy expensive packages have led USQ into – all that is required, he says, is a bit of demystification.