Applications for Students of Electrical
Engineering
Dirk Thißen, Dr. Birgit Scherff
FernUniversität Hagen
At the beginning of the new millennium, the special demands of information society, resulting from rapidly growing information databases and the more and more decreasing information half period lead to what is called lifelong learning ( Höfling 1996). Against this background, qualification concepts nowadays have to offer a kind of learning, that is independent of time and place and orientated towards the learner's individual needs ( Zimmer 1995), Therefore, in the course of an interdisciplinary research and development project InMedia, which is supported by the Ministry of Economics and Research in NRW (a federal state of Germany), research has been carried out to develop a mediadidactic concept for designing computer-assisted learning for students of electrical engineering. Up to now, the concept has exemplarily been realized in form of an HTMLbased internet learning application for mechanical engineering basics in automation technology.
The new concept has got two main objectives. First, with regard to today's high development expenses for computer based learning materials (Kerres 1995) and the desire to offer students a unique user-interface, it shall be applicable to many subjects of electrical engineering's curriculum. Second, the concept is to provide some additional value as compared with written material and especially internet learning applications, that simply put a single subject into multimedia form. To achieve these objectives a strategy for the concept's development was chosen, that is based on three main working fields.
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