Abstract:

In recent years, the possibilities for distance teaching in engineering education have increased tremendously. The widespread availability of the Internet has allowed the use of rich media over long distances. As visual connectivity improves, an opportunity to enrich and rethink the place of learning design in on-line and distance education is presenting itself.

This paper presents some examples of materials elaborated on energy concepts that, based in a deep approach to learning, can be used in traditional lectures (posters, documents, …) as well as in Learning Content Management Systems LCMS (multimedia, e-materials, …) for e-learning and b-learning in introductory engineering sciences courses. The materials include historical and modern aspects of the use of the concepts, transversal links with other engineering topics and the utmost importance of engineering evolution in creating new scientific developments. The multimedia tutorials were conceived as a helping learning task. The editor of this tutorials (exe.exe, eLearning XHTML editor) is a desktop authoring environment to assist teachers and academics in the creation of web content. The editor includes a range of pedagogical forms, e.g. objectives, advance organizers, and learning activities (text, videos, questionnaires, wikis, etc.), which constitute the equivalent of the 'teacher talk' in content resources designed for online learning.
Basic energy concepts and magnitudes such as pressure, temperature, heat, energy, power, voltage, current, etc. are well treated from the point of view of logical and mathematical development of concepts. Materials have been developed to be used in introductory courses of mechanical and electrical engineering at the University of Burgos, but can be also transferred to any other Faculty of Engineering.

Keywords:

Energy, active teaching, e-learning.