Developing and Applying Collaborative Tools for Improving Understanding in the Introductory Transportation Engineering Course

摘要

Previous work surveyed transportation engineering educators to determine current instruction practice and insight regarding efforts these educators should make. Educators need technological support for a learning community. An effective community should spawn innovation through shared ideas, mutual respect, testing, and adoption of demonstrably good approaches. This community needs infrastructure and technology to overcome communication and trust barriers. An effective transportation engineering educator learning community needs both face-to-face interaction and easy communication between meetings. Research in this project found that an online venue supporting this community must possess qualities that no single electronic tool (e.g., html website, wiki site, e-mail, forums, blogs, online database) provides and qualities were then put forth that such a venue should possess. An existing course management system is described that possess these qualities. The survey data were analyzed to determine how educators would benefit from a common online venue and the most commonly taught course topics. Then a powerful technique for developing course materials was reviewed and summarized into a development template that takes the course developer through three stages of development, terminating with a learning plan. Finally, this template was applied to four of the most commonly taught topics to develop respective learning plans.