The Silent Language

Background

Recently, there has been a shift from using lecture-based teaching methods in undergraduate engineering courses to using more learner-centered teaching approaches, such as problem-based learning. However, research on the impact of these approaches has mainly involved student perceptions of the teaching method and anecdotal and opinion pieces by faculty on their use of the teaching method, rather than empirically collected data on students' learning outcomes.



Purpose (Hypothesis)

This paper describes an investigation of the impact of problem-based learning (PBL) on undergraduate electrical engineering students' conceptual understanding and their perceptions of learning using PBL as compared to lecture.



Design/Method

Fifty-five students enrolled in an electrical engineering course at a Midwestern university participated in this research. The study utilized a within-subjects A-B-A-B research design with traditional lecture as the baseline phase and problem-based learning as the experimental phase of the study. Participants completed pre- and post-tests surrounding the four topics covered in the study and also completed a Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) survey.



Result

Results suggested participants' learning gains from PBL were twice their gains from traditional lecture. Even though students learned more from PBL, students thought they learned more from traditional lecture. We discuss these findings and offer implications for faculty interested in implementing PBL.



Conclusion

Given the limited research on the beneficial effects of PBL on student learning, this study provides empirical support for PBL. We discuss findings from this study and provide specific implications for faculty and researchers interested in problem-based learning in engineering.

Problem-based Learning: Influence on Students' Learning in an Electrical Engineering Course

Background

Case studies have been found to increase students' critical thinking and problem-solving skills, higher-order thinking skills, conceptual change, and their motivation to learn. Despite the popularity of the case study approach within engineering, the empirical research on the effectiveness of case studies is limited and the research that does exist has primarily focused on student perceptions of their learning rather than actual learning outcomes.

Purpose (Hypothesis)

This paper describes an investigation of the impact of case-based instruction on undergraduate mechanical engineering students' conceptual understanding and their attitudes towards the use of case studies.

Design/Method

Seventy-three students from two sections of the same mechanical engineering course participated in this study. The two sections were both taught using traditional lecture and case teaching methods. Participants completed pre-tests, post-tests, and a survey to assess their conceptual understanding and engagement.

Results

Results suggested that the majority of participants felt the use of case studies was engaging and added a lot of realism to the class. There were no significant differences between traditional lecture and case teaching method on students' conceptual understanding. However, the use of case studies did no harm to students' understanding while making the content more relevant to students.

Conclusions

Case-based instruction can be beneficial for students in terms of actively engaging them and allowing them to see the application and/or relevance of engineering to the real world.

Lessons Learned: Implementing the Case Teaching Method in a Mechanical Engineering Course

Curriculum reform in higher education has been taking place in many countries, with much attention paid to many such as the national-level Bologna process in Europe, institutional-level Melbourne Model in Australia and discipline-level Engineering Criteria 2000 (EC2000). This paper gives a detailed account of the reform initiatives taking place in the recent Hong Kong educational system and in particular, focusing on a research-intensive university in Hong Kong through literature and consultations. Being aware that teachers often face challenges in dealing with curriculum changes, this small-scale study aims to identify areas which faculty members require assistance in their professional development by investigating university teachers’ perception of the curriculum reform in the Science discipline. Through quantitative and qualitative methods, it was also found that academics expressed doubts towards the implementation of outcome-based and student-centered learning approaches in the new curriculum despite their understanding of these concepts.

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Faculty perspectives on the "3+ 3+ 4" curriculum reform in Hong Kong: A case study

Education for sustainable use of cement based materials

The engineering education in Kerala is undergoing dramatic changes. Around fifteen years back only cream students went for engineering studies. At present students are joining the course not for passion to engineering stream but as a matter of prestige and pressure from external environment. The scenario is not different among the faculty community also in terms of quality erosion. The present study aimed to find out the impact of age group, educational qualification, experience, extend of participation of faculty members and impact of career development programs on the quality of teaching. The most popular career development tool utilized by faculty members in the field of engineering is attending Seminars. It may be due to the fact that it is an easy task. The research revels that the majority of faculty members in the Engineering discipline belong to thirty five years and their basic qualification is B.Tech. Apart from that, attending workshops, faculty development program, participating in national and international conference helps a faculty to increase the quality of teaching. It is viewed that there is reluctance from the part faculty members in participating in career development programmes. The history of education in India The history of education in the Indian subcontinent began with teaching of traditional elements such as Indian religions, Indian mathematics, Indian logic at early Hindu and Buddhist centres of learning such as Taxila (in modern-day Pakistan) and Nalanda (in India) before the common era. Islamic education became ingrained with the establishment of the Islamic empires in the Indian subcontinent in the Middle Ages while the coming of the Europeans later bought western education to colonial India. A series of measures continuing throughout the early half of the 20th century ultimately laid the foundation of education in the Republic of India, education in Pakistan and much of South Asia.The Early education in Indian commenced under the supervision of a guru. Initially, education was open to all and seen as one of the methods to achieve Moksha, or enlightenment. As time progressed, due to superiority complexes, the education was imparted on the basis of caste and the related duties that one had to perform as a member of a specific caste. The Brahmans learned about scriptures and religion while the Kshatriya were educated in the various aspects of warfare. The Vaishya caste learned commerce and other specific vocational courses while education was largely denied to the Shudras, the lowest caste. The earliest venues of education in India were often secluded from the main population. Students were expected to follow strict monastic guidelines prescribed by the guru and stay away from cities in ashrams. However, as population increased under the Gupta empire centres of urban learning became increasingly common and Cities such as Varanasi and the Buddhist centre at Nalanda became increasingly visible. The Education in India in its traditional form was closely related to religion. Among the Heterodox schools of belief were the Jain and Buddhist schools. Heterodox Buddhist education was more inclusive and aside of the monastic orders the Buddhist education centres were urban institutes of learning such as Taxila and Nalanda where grammar, medicine, philosophy, logic, metaphysics, arts and crafts etc. were also taught. Early secular Buddhist institutions of higher learning like Taxila and Nalanda continued to function well into the common era and were attended by students from China and Central Asia. On the subject of education for the nobility Joseph Prabhu writes: \"Outside the religious framework, kings and princes were educated in the arts and sciences related to government: politics (danda-nıti), economics (vartta), philosophy (anvıksiki), and historical traditions (itihasa). Here the authoritative source was Kautilya’s The Changing Face Of Engineering Education In Kerala -An Empirical Study At Engineering Colleges In Kerala

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The Changing Face Of Engineering Education In Kerala -An Empirical Study At Engineering Colleges In Kerala

Communication Traffic, both local and long distance has been growing at a high and steady rate for decades. The increased emphasis on office automation, remote access, online transactions, and other productive measures means that this trend is likely to continue. Any business or a service relay on information technology, the range of Service expands. Finally trends in Technology enable the provision of increasing traffic capacity and the support of a wide range of service.” (William Stallings)

/pdf/transforming-collaborative-working-in-educational-3zia8xfajx.pdf

Transforming Collaborative Working in Educational Institutions with Groupware Technologies

Wireless networks are viewed as the best-used network and specifically Portable Specially Appointed Organizations (MANETs) have tracked down numerous applications for its information transmission progressively. The plan issues in this organization are to confine the utilization of energy while communicating data and give security to the hubs. Soa protocol needs to be energy efficient to avoid network failures. Thereby this paper brings an effective energy efficient to optimize LEAR and make it energy efficient. The energy-mindfulness element is added to the LEAR guiding convention in this work using the Binary Particle Swarm Optimization method (BPSO). The recommended method selects programmes taking into account course length in addition to the programme level of energy when predicting the future. To get good results, the steered challenge is first designed using LEAR. The next step is to choose a route that enhances the weighting capability of the study hours and programming power used.This MANET has been secured using the cryptographic method known as AES.According to experimental findings, the proposed hybrid version outperformed other cutting-edge models.

An Energy Efficient and Cost Reduction based Hybridization Scheme for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) over the Internet of Things (IoT)

Computing devices should really be mindful of human actions in order for flourishing human-assistive systems to be used effectively in medical services and human-robot collaboration operations. It is necessary to create a trustworthy real-time action recognition mechanism for the uninterrupted and error-free functioning of such smart devices. This can only be done with simple, intelligent methods that make advantage of all-around sensors. With both the connection of time series information in mind, this work presents a fresh way to information architecture for improved extracting features. Using the assistance of a specially created iOS application, the movement data were gathered using a smartphone. In order to identify significant both spatial and temporal elements from the signals, data from eight operations were structured into single and double channels. The Fourier and wavelet domains were used to depict raw data alongside the time domain. Other CNN models that were employed to meet the deep-learning classification of the tasks fared worse than a deep neural network that utilized a double-channeled time-domain input. Several public datasets were used to further examine this strategy, and improved results were obtained. Ultimately, the learned model's applicability was evaluated in real time on a PC and a smartphone, yielding encouraging results.

Human Activity Recognition with Anomaly Prediction for E-Health Systems using Lightweight AI

In a natural ecosystem, understanding the difficulties of the wildlife surveillance is helpful to protect and manage animals also gain knowledge around animals count, behaviour and location. Moreover, camera trap images allow the picture of wildlife as unobtrusively, inexpensively and high volume it can identify animals, and behaviour but  it has the issues of high expensive, time consuming, error, and low accuracy. So, in this research work, designed a novel wildlife surveillance framework using DCNN for accurate prediction of animals and enhance the performance of detection accuracy. The executed research work is implemented in the python tool and 2700 sample input frame datasets are tested and trained to the system. Furthermore, analyze whether animals are present or not using background subtraction and features extracted is performed to extract the significant features. Finally, classification is executed to predict the animal using the fitness of seagull. Additionally, attained results of the developed framework are compared with other state-of-the-art techniques in terms of detection accuracy, sensitivity, F-measure and error.

Ajith Sundaram

Papers

The Changing Face Of Engineering Education In Kerala -An Empirical Study At Engineering Colleges In Kerala

Transforming Collaborative Working in Educational Institutions with Groupware Technologies

An Energy Efficient and Cost Reduction based Hybridization Scheme for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) over the Internet of Things (IoT)

Human Activity Recognition with Anomaly Prediction for E-Health Systems using Lightweight AI

Modernized Wildlife Surveillance and Behaviour Detection using a Novel Machine Learning Algorithm