Animations as a tool for enhancing teaching and learning outcomes in civil engineering courses

Aravinthan, Vasantha and Worden, John (2010) Animations as a tool for enhancing teaching and learning outcomes in civil engineering courses. In: 40th Annual Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE 2010): Celebrating 40 Years of Innovation, 27-30 Oct 2010, Arlington, VA. United States.

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Abstract

Many students today are visual learners and little inclined to study printed materials or text-based on-line courses. Animations can serve as effective multimedia tools to engage these students while facilitating and enhancing the student learning experience by explaining difficult concepts through visual means instead of the traditional way of heavy textual based presentation. The importance of animations would further be realized especially when the courses are offered at distance mode where students have to rely solely on the course materials to gain in-depth understanding. The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) in Australia is internationally recognized for its external delivery of courses. In this paper, we discuss the design and delivery of animations for two courses namely Public health Engineering and Geology and Geomechanics that are normally perceived to be challenging by civil and environmental engineering undergraduates. A new and innovative teaching approach was required to facilitate the students' learning of these unfamiliar materials in these courses. Animations including multimedia facilities were conceived as a better way of presenting the concepts to the students. In this paper, we discuss and further evaluate the overall performance of students as a result of introducing animations into the curriculum.

Statistics for this ePrint Item

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Commonwealth Reporting Category E) (Paper)
Refereed:	Yes
Item Status:	Live Archive
Additional Information:	© IEEE 2010. Permanent restricted access to published version due to publisher's copyright restrictions.
Depositing User:	Dr Vasantha Aravinthan
Faculty / Department / School:	Historic - Faculty of Engineering and Surveying - Department of Agricultural, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Date Deposited:	31 Oct 2010 02:33
Last Modified:	26 Nov 2014 02:26
Uncontrolled Keywords:	animations; public health engineering; geology; multimedia tool; visual learning; environmental engineering undergraduates; geomechanics; learning outcomes; text based online courses
Fields of Research :	19 Studies in Creative Arts and Writing > 1902 Film, Television and Digital Media > 190202 Computer Gaming and Animation 13 Education > 1302 Curriculum and Pedagogy > 130212 Science, Technology and Engineering Curriculum and Pedagogy 08 Information and Computing Sciences > 0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing > 080111 Virtual Reality and Related Simulation
Socio-Economic Objective:	C Society > 93 Education and Training > 9302 Teaching and Instruction > 930203 Teaching and Instruction Technologies
Identification Number or DOI:	10.1109/FIE.2010.5673337
URI:	http://eprints.usq.edu.au/id/eprint/8451

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