Interactive e-books for engineers

Team members: Antonios Giannopoulos, Victoria Dishon, Martin Gillie, Craig Warren

Abstract

Over the past decade the use of technology to support the enhancement of learning and teaching in higher education has become increasingly important. This is true not only for face-to-face teaching of our students in Edinburgh, but also for students taking distance and blended-learning courses.

Enabling our students to have the widest possible access to engaging learning materials is a vital ingredient for flexible learning. These rich, interactive materials can provide personalised learning routes and offer the potential to deepen understanding and provide motivation for a subject. In addition they can be especially valuable for students dealing with threshold concepts, which have been identified at several points across Engineering degree programmes.

The aim of the project is to develop rich, interactive and engaging material in a single portable format - an e-Book - that can be used on a variety of modern web-enabled devices such as laptops, smartphones and tablets. Many people think of an e-Book as simply an electronic version of the printed book, containing only text. However, the current e-Book format enables authors to embed interactive elements such as video, annotated diagrams, 3D models, presentation slides, and self-test review questions. It is these interactive elements integrated into one package that offers the potential to help students contextualise and visualise difficult concepts. This project will pilot “Interactive e-Books for…Engineers” initially targeted at one pre-honours and one final-year course within the School of Engineering. The concept has a huge potential to be very successful in many other subject areas across the University.

Final project report

Download the final project report (PDF)