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| navigate: home: magazine: winter 1999: article | |
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Noise control engineering Logging onto learning—technological advances give distance education new direction By Curtis Chan | ||||||
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Editor’s note: This article is reprinted courtesy of the College of Engineering’s magazine Engineering Penn State, Summer 1998.
Distance education isn’t a new concept by any stretch of the imagination. For years, students have turned their homes and offices into their own private classrooms, taking courses through correspondence. Penn State has remained a pioneer in this field, offering one of the nation’s first correspondence study programs as early as 1892.
Leaps in technology are changing the way distance education students learn. A new initiative called Penn State’s World Campus propels the traditional correspondence course into the information age. Some of the University’s most popular undergraduate, graduate and continuing professional education programs are becoming available through the World Wide Web, computer conferencing, video and other media.
One of the first programs in the World Campus curriculum is the Noise Control Engineering Program, a noncredit certificate program from the College of Engineering’s Graduate Program in Acoustics.
The Noise Control Engineering Program, whose development was funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is aimed at preparing engineers to pass the Institute of Noise Control Engineering (INCE) certification exam, said Courtney B. Burroughs, associate professor of acoustics and senior research associate at the Applied Research Laboratory, who is serving as the lead faculty member for the program.
“The Sloan Foundation gave us the seed money to develop an interactive way of learning,” Burroughs said.
To deliver noise control engineering to students in faraway places, he said curriculum developers turned to some of the latest technological advances, including multimedia, electronic mail and the Internet. High-tech learning
Four 18-week courses make up the noise control engineering curriculum. Burroughs said the program uses a combination of independent study and collaborative, interactive learning experiences. He said each course requires teams of three to five students to complete group assignments, which they can do via the Internet.
The Noise Control Engineering Program allows students to learn as a group in a “virtual learning commu-nity” while letting them study independently. Unlike correspondence courses which can be taken at any time, registration for classes in the program is offered on a periodic basis, similar to the way a course is offered on a semester-by-semester basis on campus. Because students work collaboratively on projects, they must complete the course according to an 18-week schedule, but can study and do work at their discretion.
Burroughs said, “It’s the first time we’ve done something that is asynchronous. It used to be we had to get students to a central place off campus to participate in a videoconference. But now, the students are all over the country. They don’t have to be at the same place at the same time.”
“These courses are group based,” said Thomas Iwinski, an instructional designer with the Center for Academic Computing. “Traditional distance education courses are individual and independent learning. Here they’re not learning in isolation, but in a community. The students go through the schedule and work with each other.”
To accomplish this, the Noise Control Engineering Program relies on SoftArc’s FirstClass communications software. FirstClass offers E-mail, computer conferencing, real-time text chat and file transfer protocol (FTP) capabilities, said Bill Rose, an instructional designer for Distance Education.
Rose said that students new to noise control engineering go through an orientation using a videotape followed by print-based tutorials, where they are introduced to the software and curriculum setup.
Using FirstClass, students enter the virtual learning environment. On the screen desktop, an icon for the instructor’s office sits in the center surrounded by a dozen other icons, including ones for lessons, public chat rooms, technical support and even a resource library equipped with handy items such as a calendar, key equations and mathematical conversion factors. The desktop also has a mailbox for E-mail and a help section.
Students simply use the computer’s mouse and click their way through the units within each lesson folder. Students working on a particular unit have the ability to talk to one another through conferencing, where they can post questions, answers and suggestions to each other.
“FirstClass allows us to page through threads of discussions that begin with original messages, followed by the replies and the reply to those replies,” Rose said. “It’s the learning community idea in action.”
Rose said the E-mail, chat and conferencing capabilities support a great deal of student-to-student and student-to-instructor interaction.
“I spend as much time one-on-one with students in this program as I do in the normal classroom,” Burroughs said. “I’m enjoying the relations that I’ve developed with the students and watching the interaction that goes on between the students.” Giving students sights and sounds
The creation of the Noise Control Engineering Program began simply with the college’s acoustics faculty members writing lessons for the program’s curriculum. Animations were then created by Victor Sparrow, associate professor of acoustics, with interactive animations constructed by Andy Mayers, instructor in the College of Engineering. Then Iwinski combined the animations, sounds and digital photographs with lessons on a CD-ROM.
“We stitched all the different pieces together,” Iwinski said. “It is a very complex project since the material is mathematically dependent.”
Iwinski said the greatest challenge was combining the many facets of the program, including the individual learning activities, interactive features and graphics. The addition of sound and video files in the program gives it an additional dimension that traditional classroom lectures may lack.
“They can see and hear the results of their work,” Iwinski said. For example, students can use the computer to manipulate sound files or combine graphs. Virtual instruments
To successfully offer a program in noise control engineering, the curriculum designers needed to create a method where students could learn course material without having access to expensive equipment normally found in a class laboratory.
To solve this dilemma, Gerald Lauchle, professor of acoustics, and research assistant Dean Capone created an interactive virtual sound-level meter that could be incorporated into the course.
“We needed a virtual sound-level meter that could be put on the CD-ROM and used,” Lauchle said. He added that the computerized version of the instrument is nearly identical to the real thing.
Capone used LabVIEW, a graphical programming language, to simulate the real thing. The virtual sound-level meter had to meet strict criteria to be considered effective.
“There’s a national standard for sound-level meters we had to meet, which has a long list of requirements outlining what a sound-level meter must do,” Capone said.
Building a sound-level meter on the computer rather than a real one also presented some unique challenges.
“We had to convert equations into software rather than into circuits,” Capone said.
The computer version of the sound-level meter is identical to the real thing and comes packaged with the course materials on the CD-ROM.
“We can use this LabVIEW-based meter to simulate experiments,” Burroughs said. He added that other instruments, such as a spectral analyzer, will also be created so that students can perform a wide variety of virtual measurements that will supplement the overall learning experience. Launching the program
The initial Noise Control Engineering Program course, Basic Noise and Vibration Control, started in February 1998 with a class of 10 students.
“At first, I was not sure if this type of arrangement would work for me,” said Mike Bahtiarian, a 1985 Penn State mechanical engineering graduate, who works for a consulting engineering firm and was one of the first to enroll in the program. “However, to take this type of course on-site would require a great commitment of time and money.
“I enrolled in the program to augment my professional ‘on-the-job education.’ I am hoping this course will fill in the gaps and give me additional theory behind the engineering I perform every day.”
Burroughs agreed, saying that the program creates a cost-effective way of on-the-job training without having to send employees away to get educated. He said the first noise control engineering course was offered for a second time in August, while the second of the four courses, Intermediate Noise and Vibration Control, debuted January 1999.
“The students are really enthusiastic about this,” Rose said. “A student in Seattle was well aware of Penn State’s reputation in noise control engineering. She was excited to be a Penn State student while living in Seattle!”
While calling students to check software and systems compatibility, Rose said he has heard many similar compliments.
“It is great to hear someone say, ‘You’re making a huge difference in my life.’ ”
For more information on the Noise Control Engineering Program, visit the World Campus Web site at www.worldcampus.psu.edu, call (800) 252-3592 or send E-mail to psuwd@psu.edu. An outreach program of the College of Engineering |
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