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Session 1793

A NEW LEARNING ENVIRONMENT USING REUSABLE, INTERACTIVE LEARNING OBJECTS IN AN ENGINEERING DIGITAL LIBRARY: THE GROW-NCERL PROJECT

Muniram Budhu Professor, Department of Civil Engineering & Engineering Mechanics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721 USA. E-mail: budhu@u.arizona.edu

INTRODUCTION Libraries have always played a key role in education. They provide a place for the storage and retrieval of a large body of human knowledge. Digital technologies are now transforming and expanding the traditional roles of library. Digital libraries provide an assortment of tools for a user to search, retrieve, create, customize and share content that are available anytime, anyplace. Teachers, students and faculty can now utilize the environment provided by digital libraries to transform the way we teach and learn. Various contents can now be shared, integrated and customized to enhance learning. Educators are no longer tied to static graphics and text but can customize media-rich (interactive visualizations, simulations, speech, sound, text, etc.) content from a large repository to produce dynamic, engaging educational materials.

Delivery of instructional materials is no longer confined to real estate and scheduling but can be delivered anytime, any place using a variety of digital devices – desktop and laptop computers, PC Tablets, mobile phones, PDAs, webpads and consoles. Users can form on the spot communities or continual communities of learners for collaborative learning.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a digital library for civil engineering, the creation of learning objects at different levels of granularity and a potential new learning environment for engineering education. A key attribute of these learning objects is metadata tagging that enables these objects to be searched, retrieved and customized for different learners.

THE GROW-NCERL DIGITAL LIBRARY PROJECT

The US National Science Foundation is funding the creation of a National Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology Digital Library (NSDL; http://www.nsdl.org/). NSDL is a central system of integrating various digital libraries, each with a collection of digital objects in a specific field of information. NSDL provides information services and universal access to high quality educational resources. One of the digital libraries within NSDL is the Geotechnical, Rock and Water Resources Engineering Digital Library (GROW; www.grow.arizona.edu).

Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright©2004, American Society for Engineering Education

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Budhu, M. (2004, June), Educational Services /Outreach Opportunities In Nsdl Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--12903