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An initiative has been under way in restructuring the Aircraft Stress Analysis and Structural Design course at The Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at Delft University of Technology to meet the needs of changing undergraduate educational environment. These changes are the result of:
1. Changes in the students’ study and learning habits,
2. Expect...
Citations
... Ramsden (1997, p. 15) stated that the new (at the time) technology tool Mathematica "opens up new, exciting avenues for educators" and explained, "the revolutionary potential of new technology lies, however, in our finding new things to do with it." Since its first release in 1998, Mathematica has been widely adopted in education subjects such as math (e.g., Liu and Deng 2011), science and technology (e.g., Sato et al. 2003), and engineering (e.g., Saunders-Smits et al. 2005). However, the more recent advanced features, especially the interactive visualization functionalities, provided by Mathematica have just started to be integrated in teaching practices, and the evaluation of the impacts of such features on pedagogy has been sparse. ...
Teaching relatively complex quantitative topics in statistics, operations management, and management science to undergraduate as well as graduate students can pose numerous pedagogical challenges. However, several topics in these disciplines are amenable to exposition by means of dynamic interactive visualizations. We present a sample of such visualizations and discuss their implications for pedagogy. We also discuss how optimization modeling and a single data set can be leveraged to expose students to multiple variants of covering models and, more importantly, how visualizations can be used to quickly demonstrate the differences in these models. We present empirical evidence that by using dynamic interactive visualizations we are able to enhance the student learning experience.
... Next to that they were offered full support from all the administrative bodies within the university from the didactical service unit, registration, legal services, marketing department and of course ICT and the New Media Centre. The research group ASCM of the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering has a long running tradition of educational innovation [4,5,6,7] and excellence. Over the past 4 years two of its lecturers have been awarded the coveted Aerospace Teacher of the Year Award. ...
These days a university can no longer afford to only deliver its courses face-to-face. Many universities record their lectures, offer online courses, offer free educational content online to al using OpenCourseWare (OCW) or even run and assess complete courses for anyone who is willing to participate via the principle of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
At Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, which has a longstanding tradition in Open Course Ware, similar developments are taking place. From September 2012 the development has started of three online MSc programmes in Aerospace Engineering, Water Management and Engineering and Policy Analysis respectively.
This paper aims to share experiences of the Aerospace Structures and Computational Mechanics group at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering in their aim to develop and run online Master courses both for their own students as well as external Master students from anywhere in the world.
Courses that are being developed into an online format are courses in linear and non-linear modeling using Finite Element Methods, advanced structural analysis, buckling of structures, design and optimization of composite structures and adaptive aerospace structures.
In this paper the didactical design of the course content, of the method of delivery, and of the assessment of the online courses will be explained. Next to that results of the first experiences will be shared as well as the outcomes of student evaluations of the first courses that have ran online. The paper will also include set of recommendations and lessons learned for others with similar initiatives to benefit from.
... The course under consideration in this paper is the course "Aircraft Stress Analysis and Structural Design", course code AE2-521N, which is taught in the second year of the Bachelor's curriculum at the Delft University of Technology (TUDelft), Faculty of Aerospace Engineering [2]. This course is traditionally experienced by students as being a difficult course. ...
This paper discusses the results of a one-year experiment of a course on aircraft stress analysis and design in the second year of the BSc phase at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Delft University of Technology. The experiment entails an electronic version of a classical reader in wiki format. The reason for this experiment is based on a practical need, namely the nature of the course having a large content and a wide diversity. This makes it difficult to present all the material in a classical reader in a comprehensive way and to clearly indicate the links between the different parts of the course content. Therefore a wiki provides an ideal environment to easily link different subjects to each other. Furthermore since students are allowed to edit the wiki, which is an innate property of the software, the course contents should become more comprehensive for the students. It was shown that students are not really enthusiastic about a wiki format reader, and prefer a written version. The main reason for not editing a wiki reader is that students find themselves too inexperienced, or simply do not have the time to edit the content.
... The course of Aircraft Structural Analysis and Design in its current form was designed 4 years ago in 2004 [1]. The course was designed because of a gap in the Bachelor's program when it came to the design of aerospace structures. ...
Although digital learning applications have been available to lecturers for several years, lecturers are still hesitant to intensively use them due to restrictions in time and budget. To help lecturers overcome this hurdle TU Delft offers its lecturers small grants to implement digital learning in their courses through the GRASSROOTS project. One such project is based at the faculty of Aerospace Engineering and aims to use the test module in the Blackboard electronic learning environment in the course Aircraft Stress Analysis and Structural Design. This is a 2nd year BSc course. The test module is used for three reasons. First of all, the lectures cover an extensive amount of material and students need to be encouraged to keep up with the course contents. Secondly, at the end of the course the students need to be able to deal with large design problems. Necessary skills cannot properly be assessed through a traditional hand-written exam only. Third, the course traditionally enrols a large number of students (350+), therefore, automatic evaluation of the students' answers is desirable. To encourage the students to practice their design skills, we put regular Quizzes online for the students, to test them on material dealt with in the recent lectures. This stimulates students to look at the course notes, which contributes to a better understanding of future lectures. The second challenge is dealt with by providing students with an extensive design exercise to be solved using numeric tools. After one -two weeks, students are examined on the design problem via BlackBoard. This is offered three times during the course, and is not compulsory. This paper describes the experiences and lessons learned whilst making advanced use of the BlackBoard online testing tools. The paper gives recommendations on how to prepare and deal with such tests for future users. Included in the lessons learned are reports on the opinion and responses of the students.
... To help lecturers overcome this hurdle TU Delft offers its lecturers small grants to implement digital learning in their courses through the GRASSROOTS project[1]. One such project is the development of a dedicated Wikipedia encyclopaedia[2] using course material generated jointly by teachers and students participating in the 2nd year BSc course Aircraft Stress Analysis and Structural Design [3]. ...
Although digital learning applications have been available to lecturers for several years, they are still hesitant to intensively use these tools due to restrictions in time and budget. To help lecturers overcome this hurdle TU Delft offers its lecturers small grants to implement digital learning in their courses through the GRASSROOTS project[1]. One such project is the development of a dedicated Wikipedia encyclopaedia[2] using course material generated jointly by teachers and students participating in the 2nd year BSc course Aircraft Stress Analysis and Structural Design [3].
Teaching staff at TU Delft generally have a double appointment combining research with lecturing in their area of research. Including their research work as state of the art topical content in courses requires course material to be generated on-the-fly. Publishing of course materials such as lecture notes and books usually lags behind presentation thereof. Also developing course material while aiming for sufficient study results is in the current social environment a cooperative teacher-student activity requiring efficient generation of course material, immediate incorporation of feedback and optimal delivery of course material. Thirdly activating students to assist in developing course material is a strong motivator for participation. Considering the social aspects and continuous on-line availability a Wikipedia encyclopaedia is the social software tool of choice.
This paper describes the experiences and lessons learned whilst developing a Wikipedia encyclopaedia of course material[4]. Conclusions from project development and deployment together with recommendations for future improvement are presented. Also the opinions and responses of the students participating in the project are reported.
