Reformation of the curriculum of the Department of Electronics of Technological Educational Institute of Crete: A review

POLYXENI ARAPI, GEORGE GLENTIS, NIKOLAOS LIMPERAKIS, MARINA PAPADAKI, and

IOANNIS EMM. TOMADAKIS Department of Electronics

Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Branch of Chania 3, Romanou Str., Chalepa, Chania 731 33

GREECE

Abstract: In this paper, recent advances in the reformation of the curriculum of the Department of Electronics of Technological Educational Institute of Crete are presented. This action is supported by the EPEAEK-�� program funded by the Greek Ministry of Education and Religion Affairs and aims in the improvement of the education process in the field of electronics engineering, incorporating modern approaches and tools of learning, at a theoretical, as well as at a practical level. Key-Words: reformation of curriculum, electronics engineering, e-learning 1 Introduction Within the last decade the rate of changes in electronic engineering has been significantly accelerated, leading to a constantly increasing need for engineers with the appropriate knowledge and skills in various application fields, [1], [2]. Under the above consideration, a reform of the electronic engineering program at the Technological Educational Institute of Crete - Branch of Chania took place, beginning at the academic year 2000-01. It is now organized as a 4-year program, including the conduction of a student thesis and incorporating half a year of practical placement for workplace learning. In particular, the curriculum consists of a number of courses organized according to the European Credit Transfer System-ECTS (most of them taught in combination with laboratory exercises), which leads to a specialization in the areas of automation and telecommunications (during the 6th and 7th semesters). These courses are grouped in basic courses (mathematics, physics, electromagnetism, etc.), information technology courses, non-technical courses (legislation, business, etc.), courses in electronics, courses in foreign languages, as well as courses in the specialization areas. The second phase of the reformation of the curriculum of our department, begun at 2003, under the framework of the EPEAEK-�� program (Operational Program for Education and Initial Vocational Training). The main objectives of the project are: - Introduction of new tools and methods in the

education process, including e-learning and seminar teaching.

- Introduction of a new computer lab for the

support of: a. Scientific computing b. Hardware description languages

- Introduction of new elective courses in modern electronics engineering and information technology fields.

2 Assessment of students’ familiarity with information technology The reformation of undergraduate studies programs, which aims in the modernization of the knowledge and the qualifications that are provided to the students, needs to rely on new technologies. In which degree however students own the required equipment and use new services? For these and other questions, it is attempted to get reliable answers through the present work. Two questionnaires were drawn up for the collection of the required data.

Table 1: Questionnaires’ details

Details 1st

Questionnaire 2nd

Questionnaire Intended for semester 1 semesters 5-8 Questions: t/c/o/m* 29/25/2/2 26/22/2/2 Common questions 23 Pages (A4) 2 Collected sheets 101 123 Valid sheets 100 121 Sheets from intended semesters 55 (55%) 68 (56%)

* total/closed type/open type/mixed type

The questionnaires were distributed to the students in two successive days, during the first examination period in January 2004. They were completed by the students anonymously and were returned by them on their exit from the class. The main results of the above work are presented in the following subsections together with some conclusions that arose combining answers from various categories. 2.1 Computer equipment owned by the students As shown in Fig.1, most of the students own a PC at home. Two in three of them bought it when they were pupils.

Home PCNo14% Yes

86%

Internet Connection

Yes63%

No37%

ReasonPC

room3%

Cost32%

Friend's23%

Unnecessary 42%

1st s

em 4

9%

Fig.1: Computer equipment owned by the students

The biggest part of the students who have not bought a PC yet, rate it as unnecessary for their needs. The analysis of the answer sheets, however, revealed that most of them (77%) are first semester students. Cost is still an inhibitory factor. Many students use their friend’s PC and a small part is serviced in Institute’s students’ PC room. A lot of home PC users do not have any kind of Internet connection. It was not investigated but it is well known that many of the students who come from other cities don’t have a phone line in their room since they accommodate their voice communication needs with mobile phones. This makes their connection to the Internet more difficult.

2.2 Computer use and favorite applications Students were asked how often do they use a computer. As it is shown in Fig.2, nearly half of them use a computer for more than 2h/day.

Computer use

(Blanks)3%

Rarely19% Any

2%

<2h/day28%

>2h/day48%

Fig.2: Computer use by the students According to their answers, their most time-consuming activities in front of a computer are surfing the Web, playing PC games and running multimedia applications. Writing reports for their courses draws also a lot of their time on the computer. 2.3 Use of Internet services In our research we tried to get valuable information about the relation of our students with the following Internet services: the World Wide Web (WWW), the e-mail and the Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The frequency with which the two main student groups of our research surf the web is shown in Fig.3. On average, roughly half of the students surf the web daily. More often, they visit web sites with content related to personal computers. Web pages with artistic content or related to electronics as well as news portals follow on.

Surfing the Web

57%

9%

16%18%

4%

33%

7%

29%27%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

Blanks Rarely Not at all <1h/day >1h/day

Sem. 1 Sem 5-8

Fig.3: Surfing the Web

Additive facts and figures are arrayed in Table 2. It worth’s to mention that just one-third of the students wrote correctly the URL of our Department’s website, which is less from the percentage of them who wrote correctly the address of a search engine.

Table 2: Additive facts and figures Figures (%) Facts

Sem. 1 Sem. 5-8 Surf the web daily 34 56 Wrote a search engine’s name correctly

48 65

Wrote a search engine’s URL correctly

44 41

Wrote Institute’s URL correctly 11 37

Maintain a personal website 16 8

Have an e-mail account 58 77

Use e-mail for their courses often 5 22

Have been registered on mailing lists 22 33

Use IRC service frequently 25 14

On the average 70% of the students use their e-mail at least once every week while 44% of them use it daily. The percentages of the students that maintain a personal website or use IRC is greater to the newer ones. 2.4 Word processing First semester students were asked how many pages had they typed since that day using word processing software. The corresponding chart is shown in Fig.4.

Typed text pages

None15%

<3013%

<10029%

>10032%

(blank)11%

Fig.4: Typed text pages by 1st sem. students

Next, they were asked if they know how to perform basic text formatting operations (Fig.5).

Basic text formatting operations

5 5 4 5 4 5

3124 29 24 29

45

6471 67 71 67

49

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Numbe

r pag

es

Numbe

r par

agra

phs

Inser

t a ta

ble

Impo

rt pic

tures

Inser

t hea

der a

nd fo

oter

Inser

t foo

tnotes

Yes

No

(Blanks)

Fig.5: Basic text formatting ability of 1st sem.

students

By combining data from Fig.4 and 5, there’s no doubt that about 25% of the first semester students cannot create a rich coursework report in a computer easily. 2.5 Spreadsheets First semester students were also asked if they have ever use spreadsheets software. Thirty three per cent of them replied affirmatively and just 27% wrote that could draw a chart using it (Fig.6).

Basic operations

16 16 18

44 4755

40 36 27

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Find s

um

Find a

vera

ge

Draw

a ch

art

Yes

No

(Blanks)

Fig.6: Spreadsheets operated by 1st sem. students

Ignorance of use, declared on average 19% of the fifth semester students and above and 42% wrote that they didn’t need it until now.

3 Progress of students in the course flow A systematic data collection concerning the performance of the students, after the programs reform leads to some important conclusions. The analysis of the data indicates prospects under consideration and issues that we have to face in order to provide the right type of education for future electronic professionals. Most of the courses taught together with laboratory exercises. It is expected that the practical experience gaining at the lab will help students perform better at the theory exams. However this is not the case. Looking at the data concerning basic courses (for example Physics) and also more advanced courses (for example microelectronics), we conclude the following: - The lab performances of the students are far

better than the theoretical ones (Fig.7, 8). [The indexes described as 00s/01s/02s: 2000/2001/2002 spring semesters, 00w/01w/02w: 2000/2001/2002 winter semesters]

- However an important percentage of students at low semesters do not choose to attend lab courses

- So there is still a gap between students who did not succeed the previous years of their studies and try again and those who try to pass for the first time. It seems that the percentage of the previous semesters students does not decrease.

40 37

77

16

7969

45 43

164

4351

34

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

180

�0s ��w �1s �1w �2s �2w

performances of students at the Physics course (theory)

number of students who gave exams

nubmer of students who passed

Fig.7: Performances of students at the Physics course (theory)

75 73

95

42

83 8175

72

8477

89 88

0

20

40

60

80

100

�0s ��w �1s �1w �2s �2w

performances of the students at the Physics course (lab)

number of students who gave exams

nubmer of students who passed

Fig.8: Performances of students at the Physics course (lab)

Furthermore, students who are following the teaching semester seem to perform equally well (and sometimes even better) with small difference on the successful rates than the students from previous semesters ones (Table 3). (We still use the data from the Physics course but the same results apply to the rest courses and the same conclusions are even stronger to more advanced courses).

Table 3: Success rates for the Physics course

(theory) Success rates for the Physics course (theory)

Semesters

For the students who follow the teaching semester

For the students who come from previous semesters

2000spring 90,48% 94,74% 2001spring 85,00% 89,74% 2001winter 90,48% 100,00% 2002spring 22,41% 28,30% 2002winter 69,23% 64,00%

4 Supporting electronically the education process A task of this project was to setup an e-learning platform in order to support the education process in the Technological Educational Institute of Crete - Branch of Chania. There are many e-learning systems that support education through the Web. A thorough study and evaluation of existing e-learning systems has been conducted in order to select the most appropriate for the needs of the institution. For this reason, the user requirements have been identified after discussions with the institution’s instructors and students, and used for the

specification of the criterions for the selection of the most appropriate e-learning platform. The basic user requirements were: - Possibility of organizing the educational

material of the Institute’s courses in the frames of the existing educational process, without further specialization of the instructors that will use the platform.

- Possibilities of facilitation of management of many courses in the structure of the Department of Electronics, but also management of students and professor roles.

- Possibility of future extensions of the platform. From the above requirements the following criterions for the selection of the platform came up: - Support of distinct roles of student, professor

and administrator. - Easy of use by the professors with possibility of

importing existing (mainly) educational material files or web pages.

- Easy installation and management. - Greek language support. - Open source e-learning platform, so that they

are possible likely modifications or still extensions of the functionality of the platform.

Based on these criterions, a search and examination of the available e-learning platforms began in order to take a final decision. Beyond the experience of the project members, two sites were very useful in the comparison process:

�� Edutools comparison tools (http://www.edutools.info/course/productinfo/index.jsp), and

�� the UNESCO Free Software Portal (http://www.unesco.org/webworld/portal_freesoft/Software/Courseware_Tools/).

With their help an initial search was conducted in order to find a number of candidate systems that meet our needs and exclude others that were found far from our needs. After the search process, we concluded to three candidate platforms, which were thereafter installed and examined in detail: ATutor (http://www.atutor.ca), Moodle (http://moodle.org) and Claroline (http://www.claroline.net). Finally, Claroline was decided as the most appropriate according to our selection criterions. The basic reason of this choice was simplicity. Easy of use was for us a very important requirement since further specialization of the instructors (but also of the students) was not desirable. After a short time we found another system, named GUNET eClass (http://eclass.gunet.gr), which is essentially the Claroline system with some

improvements. For example, the greek interface is more attractive and user friendly. In addition, several useful functionalities, which will be referred later in this paper, were added. eClass was proven better and thus decided to be used for the support of the educational process in the institution. In the following subsection we will describe eClass and refer to the basic eClass (and in parallel Claroline) characteristics.

4.1 eClass eClass is a Web Based Course Management System. It's a collaborative learning environment allowing teachers or educational institutes to create and administer courses through the web.

Technically speaking, a "teacher" on eClass need only to be familiar with his preferred browser (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, ...). After logging in as a teacher in eClass (registration is required), he will be asked to type text in forms, to click on OK and to prepare locally on his own computer quality documents to be uploaded on the website.

Through eClass the teacher is able to: - Publish documents in any format (PDF, HTML,

Office, Video...). - Run public or private discussion forums. - Manage a list of links. - Create student groups. - Compose exercises. - Structure an agenda with tasks and deadlines. - Make announcements (also via email). - Have students submit papers. Additional functionality of eClass: - Support of users: teacher, student, administrator - Support of structured courses presentation:

schedule, announcements, documents, related links

- Easy activation/deactivation of sections - Extended statistics system The eClass platform for the Technological Educational Institute of Crete - Branch of Chania is available in web at http://eclass.chania.teicrete.gr

4.2 Statistics In Fig.9 is shown the eClass Platform usage for the last 12 months, starting at 1 July 2004 and ending at 7 June 2005, according the network and user’s statistics of eClass web site as they are retrieved from the log files of the web server. In particular we can see the page views, number of visits and amount of data transferred through this period. It’s obvious that all page views and visits on the site start to increase around October time until May,

except periods that the Institute is closed for vacations (Christmas & Easter period). The main reason that the number of visits is increasing is that there are more courses offered through eClass.

Definitions: - Pageview (page impression): Each time a page

is show on the users screen is counted as a pageview. Each page can contain images and text and other data.

- Visit: A visit is defined to be a consecutive sequence of page views made by a user at this site. If a user idles for more than 30 minutes, the next series of hits he/she makes is counted as another visit. Users a distinguished with a combination of cookies and IP Addresses.

Fig.9: Usage Summary last 12 months

The statistics in the section below concern the platform usage according the information that is logged from the system itself and is stored in eClass Database. The usage period is from 14 July 2004 until 8 June 2005. �� No of login:

o Last Month (9-May-05 to 8-June-05): 3086 o Last 7 days (7-June-05 to 8-June-05): 349 o Today (8-June-05): 42

�� No of teachers: 37 �� No of students: 421 �� No of announcements: 81 �� Average of announcements per course: 1,12 �� No of courses: 72

o Courses on Electronics Dept.: 56 o Courses on Natural Resources Systems

Engineering Dept.: 16 �� No of courses regarding status:

o Open Courses (Free Access): 66 o Open Courses with Registration (Account

Required): 6 o Closed courses: 0

�� Average of courses per teacher: 1,94 �� No of files uploaded: 315 �� Average of files per course: 4,37

�� No of teacher’s files uploaded: 179 �� Average of files uploaded per teacher: 4,83 �� No of student’s files uploaded: 136 �� Average of files uploaded per student: 0,32 �� No of submitted online exercises: 15 �� Average of submitted exercises per course: 0,20 Examining the statistics of platform usage, we are able to export the following conclusions: - Considering that there are about 140 teachers in

the Institute - Branch of Chania, 26% of them have used the eClass platform during the 1st year that it is available.

- Platform teachers mostly use eClass for uploading and disseminating files like courses notes, exercises, papers etc (4,37 files per course).

- On the other side, eClass teachers do not use the platform too much for uploading announcements (just 1,12 per course) as well as for creating online exercises (0,20 submitted exercises/per course). So, the number of uploaded files from students is just 136.

5 Conclusions Recent advances in the reformation of the curriculum on the Department of Electronics of Technological Educational Institute of Crete have been presented. Assessment of the students’ familiarity with information technology was carried out through a survey. The progress of students in the course flow was analyzed. The results obtained are useful in the design of the reformulated curriculum. 6. Acknowledgement The Greek Ministry of Education and Religion Affairs supported this work, under the framework of the Program EPEAEK-��, Measure 2.2.2.a ‘Reformation of the Undergraduate Curriculum’. References: [1] Brown, R.B. (1992), ‘Incorporating CAD into an

electrical engineering/computer science curriculum,’ IEEE Trans. Education, Vol. 35, Aug. 1992, pp. 182-189.

[2] Ulaby. F.T., and Director S.W. (2000), ‘Scanning the Issue: Special Issue on Electrical and Computer Engineering Education,’ Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 88, Jan. 2000.