Use of Computer Generated Visuals in the Teaching of Environmental Engineering Classes
Dr. Adrian Hanson, PE , NMSU/CAGE
Abstract
There has been a concerted effort to bring the computer into the classroom as a presentation tool, and as a tool for implementation of the “what-if-paradigm”. For years engineering students struggled with yellowed overheads and hand scratching on the blackboard. One of the problems faced by faculty teaching young engineers is a lack of intuitive knowledge. It is difficult for the students to assimilate the design concepts until they understand the function. The computer platform makes it possible to cleanly introduce video clips and computer simulations into the classroom.
Computer based presentation tools allow the professor to build student intuition by showing the students real life examples to go along with the lines and boxes traditionally drawn. The projection system also allows real-time models to be demonstrated in the classroom setting. This combination of visual tools assists the student in assimilating the information presented. The computer slides incorporate real-time simulations and animations in color that impart an additional dimension to the learning process. This method has been utilized in advanced courses such as: Design Workshop for Soil & Groundwater Remediation; Fate & Transport of Environmental Contaminants; Chemical/Physical Treatment of Water; Sampling and Monitoring In the Environment, Air Pollution Control, Design of Soil Vapor Extraction Systems, Analysis of Surface Water Quality Data .
From kindergarten teachers to university professors it has long been recognized that there are a number of learning styles exhibited by students. Recently the teaching profession has been exhorting practitioners to teach to the students learning style. Abandon the traditional lecture format and teach the student in a manner which will assist the student in retaining the information presented. Unfortunately, if there are 10 students in a classroom there are probably at least three distinct learning styles represented. In addition, abandoning the traditional lecture format usually means adopting a teaching style that requires more time to transmit the same amount of information, and no one, including the student, is willing to invest the additional time. In this paper we will briefly review the learning styles and show how new technology provides tools for addressing the varying learning styles and allows the instructor to optimize the use of classroom time.
Learning Styles
Learning styles are frequently categorized as visual vs. verbal, active vs. introspective, interactive vs. individual. Felder (1996) notes that information comes in all forms and a student needs to learn to function well in both verbal and visual modes. If a teacher continually presents information to a student in a format which they find uncomfortable, the presentation technique may interfere with the learning process. Felder notes that, conversely students who are taught exclusively in their preferred mode may not develop the mental dexterity needed in the professional world for dealing with diverse information inputs. This leads directly to the conclusion that one of the objectives of education should be to help students build their skills in both their preferred and their less preferred learning modes. Kolb(1984) refers to this as "teaching around the cycle". If one is to provide the students with this broad diverse learning experience, one must understand the student learning styles that need to be addressed.
Felder provides a nice summary discussion of four learning styles models, here these four models will be mentioned, but not discussed. The reader interested in the models is referred to Felder’s paper. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Model classifies students according to their learning preferences on scales derived from psychologist Carl Jung’s theory of psychological types. The classes are:
Extraverts, who try things out or introverts, who think things through. Sensors, who are practical, detail oriented, focused on facts and procedures. Intuitor’s, who are imaginative, concept oriented focused on meanings and possibilities. Thinkers, who are skeptical and tend to make decisions based on logic and rules. Feelers, who tend to make decisions based on personal and humanistic considerations. Judgers, who set and follow agendas, seeking closure even with incomplete data. Perceivers, who adapt to change and resist closure to obtain more data.
Traditional engineering lecturers tend to focus on the introvert, intuition, thinker, judger.
Kolb’s learning style model classifies students as having a preference for 1) concrete experience or abstract conceptualization (information collection), and 2) active experimentation or reflective observation (information internalization). The four types of learners in this scheme are: Type 1, concrete/reflective; Type 2, abstract/reflective; Type 3, abstract/active; Type 4, concrete/active. Traditional engineering lectures focus on the Type 2 learner.
The Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument model classifies student thinking by correlating their dominant thought pattern with the physical function of the four brain quadrants. Quadrant A, left brain/cerebral thinkers, exhibit thought processes which are logical, analytical, quantitative, factual, and critical. Quadrant B, left brain/limbic thinkers, exhibit thought processes which are sequential, organized, planned, detailed, and structured. Quadrant C, right brain/limbic thinkers, exhibit thought processes which are emotional, interpersonal, sensory, kinesthetic, and symbolic. Quadrant D, right brain/cerebral thinkers, exhibit thought processes which are visual, holistic, and innovative. Traditional engineering education focuses on Quadrant A and Quadrant B activities. Felder(1996) notes that this imbalance is a disservice to all students, but it is particularly a disservice to the 20 to 40% of engineering students whose thinking patterns are Quadrant C and Quadrant D dominated.
The Felder-Silverman Learning Style model classifies student thinking in categories similar to the classes used by the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator model. Sensing learners, who are practical, oriented toward facts and procedures, or intuitive learners, who think in conceptual terms. They are innovative, oriented toward theories and meanings. Visual learners, who prefer visual representations of material (diagrams, graphs, pictures) or verbal learners, who prefer the written or spoken presentation to the visual. Inductive learners, who prefer presentations to proceed form specific to general or deductive learners, who prefer presentations to proceed from specific to general. Active learners, who try things out and work with others or reflective learners, who think things through working alone. Sequential learners, who are linear thinkers that take small incremental steps or global learners, who are holistic thinkers that take quantum leaps in their thought processes. Felder notes that engineering education has been largely biased toward intuitive, verbal, deductive, reflective, sequential learners, while students, unfortunately, rarely fall into all five of these categories. Thus, most engineering students receive an education which is mismatched to their learning styles.
It is completely unreasonable to expect each engineering class to address all of the learning styles in any of the models listed above. Many of the proposed teaching techniques which incorporate the “teaching around the cycle” are time intensive. While many of the introductory classes must transfer a large amount of foundational information to a large number of students, and do so in three hours of lecture time per week. Whether one approves of these constraints is immaterial. The university system as it is currently designed allows very little flexibility. Given current fiscal trends these constraints may in fact tighten. Many universities are faced with state legislatures which are limiting credit hours in an undergraduate degree and university administrations which are cutting faculty positions. This tightening of constraints is a historical problem.
The reader is asked to recall that 30 years ago many of the B.S. engineering programs were 5 year programs. None of the 5-year programs are left. The information that must be transmitted per unit contact hour between professor and student has increased over time and will continue to increase. The question is how do we meet the challenge? The author suggests that with the new multimedia technologies available to faculty it may be possible to develop lectures which improve greatly our addressing of the varied learning styles of our student while we continue to move the large amounts of information required by our information intensive curricula.
There is a great deal of interest in multimedia curriculum development. The faculty member can lecture as usual, and while lecturing can include color graphics, video clips and even interactive spreadsheets during the lecture. One of the very attractive features of this approach is the student teacher contact time remains the same, but the learning styles addressed is increased and the information presented is greater. The downside of this teaching technique is the large amount of time required to prepare the lectures. The remainder of this paper will share with the readers the author’s approach to incorporating computer presentations into the classroom.
The general approach is to transfer all of the traditional lecture notes to a presentation package. The slide presentation is then augmented with video clips, spreadsheets, and slides. The slides are printed out, placed in a binder, and made available to the students at cost. The students then take notes in the binder alongside of the view graphs. Problems and handouts containing detailed information on the topic being presented are included in the binder immediately following the view graphs. The notes and detailed supplements address the verbal learners needs, and the graphics and video clips address the visual learners needs. It is important to note that, even if a student is a dominant verbal learner, there are times when the intuition building supplied by the visual material greatly enhances the learning experience. The following list gives general pro’s and con’s to teaching using this approach.
Pro’s
1) increases the amount of material that can be covered in a period
2) eases the students note taking burden, and thus improves student comprehension
3) eases the blackboard burden(and usually provides the student with better quality visuals and therefore better comprehension)
4) colorful(dynamic) presentation improves student attention and thus enhances comprehension
Con’s
1) preparing a class is a huge amount of work up front
2) can present such a large amount of material that the student has no time to digest
3) There is a danger that the slides become academic sound bites, and the student focuses on the view graphs to the point where their educational experience is narrowed to the material on the view graphs. Some students may even try to use the provided notes to replace the textbook.
4) The students rely on the notes to the point that they get “lazy brain”. The notes are intended to enhance the students lecture experience and provide a platform to build the class notes around. They are not intended as the sole note material from the class.
Presentation Materials
There are two distinct presentation materials that need to be addressed: the computer generated slides, and the notebooks. The slides will be discussed in this paper. Philosophically the slides are the blackboard, not a textbook. The process of thinking through slides for a class is identical to the thinking a faculty member goes through when preparing notes for lecture. However, these are not your notes! The slides are the board that the student sees. If you are a professor who tends to take minimal notes into lecture and then lectures from sketchy notes, it may be very time consuming to produce a set of slides. One way to make the process more palatable is to borrow a copy of notes from a good student. Lets go over some basic guidelines for preparing slides.
Text:
Keep it short
Use a blocky font such as Swiss or
Be careful with special effects such as shadows and italics. If there is a possibility that the lecture will be used both for live classroom and for distance education (television broadcast) the special effects strongly discouraged. Bold is the exception to the rule. Bold is turns out well as a special effect.
Changing font color works well for adding emphasis. If the material is to be tv broadcast, keep the contrast as high as possible, but be careful with reds. Red colors tend to bleed when broadcast. For a local lecture a blue background with red letters looks striking, but broadcast it loses all of its sharp edges. Yellow or gold letters on a royal blue background works well.
Font size is a function of intended use. A font size of 20 is an absolute minimum. If the material is going to be broadcast an absolute minimum font size is 24. The TV producer would like 36 as a minimum, but the amount of material per image becomes so small that it is almost difficult to lecture off from the slides.
Graphics:
Never scan anything you can draw. High resolution scan files will be from 0.5 - 1 mb, while a very high quality drawing will be from 0.005 to 0.01 mb. If it is a line drawing or a graph do not scan it!!! Scans are useful as patterns for drawings. Import the scan lay a drawing over it and then delete the scan. Be very cautious in producing drawings. When the presentation drawings are prepared for the notebooks, they will be converted to black and white or grey tones. Black and white reproduce much better, but certain types of fill operations do not convert effectively to black and white. Try an operation on a slide and print it before you create a large number of slides using the special effect.
If you are using scans, experiment with file type and scan density. TIFFs, BITMAPs, and PICTs are all large formats. JPGs and GIFs are smaller, but may lack the resolution required in some applications. In general small file size equals poor resolution. If the lecture is being prepared for television broadcast, poor resolution is probably acceptable since tv is a low resolution media. However, if the image is to be used locally and project on an 8’ by 6’ screen, high resolution may be required. On way to reduce file size on scanned images is to select as few colors as needed. If scans are performed with millions of colors, they are much larger than if they are performed with 16 colors or 256 colors. This again is especially important with lectures prepared for tv. Television has a very limited capability to produce colors, don’t waste space on information that can not be transmitted.
Again, be cautious with reds if the presentation material is to be broadcast. Having said be careful with red, it is necessary to add that, as a general rule, primary colors are best. Put together your color scheme, take it to the studio and look at it, what you see on the screen of your computer is not what you will see once the image is projected or broadcast. No thin lines or small objects. Use bold lines with large arrow-heads. Use large markers on graphs. It may look odd on the computer screen, but it is the projected image which is critical. The small features disappear if the image is projected in a large room, or is broadcast for television.
Video clips can be easily captured with a VCR and a $150.00 capture card. The clips may be extremely large and may present slowly if the computer being used in the classroom has insufficient local resources. It is suggest that at least 64 mb of RAM and a 4 Gb hard-drive be available. The raw material for the video clips can be collected either from your own footage or from commercial footage as long as fair use is respected. Attempt to clip only what you want to show in class. The editing packages have a steep learning curve and there are few on campus to teach you how to use them. The clips are great for the students.
Have funJ
References
Felder, R, 1996, Matters of Style, ASEE Prism, December, pp. 18- 22.
Kolb, D. A., 1984, Experimental Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development, Prentice Hall- Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
Hanson, A., N. Khandan and B. Thomson, 1997a, Use of Computer Generated Visuals and Interactive Notebooks: A Model for Both the Classroom and Distance Education, ASEE Southwestern Regional Conference, Houston TX.
Hanson, A., N. Khandan and B. Thomson, 1997b, Use of Computer Generated Visuals and Interactive Notebooks in the Teaching of Advanced Engineering Classes, Air and Waste Management Associations 90th Annual Meeting, Toronto, Canada
Institute for Academic Technology, University of North Carolina, March,
1995