Paper Authors

Abstract

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

Main Menu Session 2202

Learner Adaptation to Digital Libraries by Engineering Students

Narayanan Komerath, Marilyn Smith School of Aerospace Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332-0150

Digital library: "A managed environment of multimedia materials in digital form, designed for the benefit of its user population, structured to facilitate access to its contents, and equipped with aids to navigate the global network ... with users and holdings totally distributed, but managed as a coherent whole." --Mel Collier, International Symposium on Research, Development, and Practice in Digital Libraries 1997

Abstract

This paper examines how digital libraries (DL) may be integrated into the learning resources of engineering students. The advent of digital libraries has opened revolutionary opportunities in engineering education. The diversity of resources offers rich opportunities to enhance engineering education, providing access to data, codes, problems and information that are far beyond what each individual teacher has time to develop. However, students are largely unaware of the DL resources, as well as the most efficient manner to utilize them. Learners still require a disciplined study scheme and expert guidance to select and convert information to lasting knowledge. To complicate matters further, professors are hindered by the lack of systematic knowledge on the attitudes, skills, and learning styles of students. This problem is most acute at for students at the freshman through graduate levels in advanced e ngineering programs. This paper lays out the problems and provides initial results on how students are accessing internet- based material in engineering courses, as well as ideas for improving their ability to reach the best problem-solving resources.

I. Introduction

The advent of digital libraries has opened revolutionary opportunities in engineering education. Access to technical information has literally become possible at the speed of thought. The diversity of resources offers rich opportunities to enhance engineering education, providing access to well-crafted products that are far beyond what each individual teacher can develop in a given course. Combined efforts by several government agencies led by the National Science Foundation have invested in the development of “national digital libraries” devoted to science, mathematics, engineering and technology education. Such efforts aim to bring peer review, archiving, classification and organization to digital resources. This paper examines some of the issues faced in the classroom as engineering faculty seek to effectively utilize such resources in engineering curricula.

Learners still require a disciplined study scheme and expert guidance to convert information to lasting knowledge. To exploit the true potential of digital libraries in education, one must attain

“Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright Ó 2002, American Society for Engineering Education”

Main Menu

• Citation

• Format
  • APA
  • APA - LaTeX bibitem
  • MLA
  • MLA - LaTeX bibitem
  • Bibtex
  • EndNote - RIS

Smith, M. (2002, June), Learner Adaptation To Digital Libraries By Engineering Students Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--11053