Bringing industry experience into the 'classroom' via multimedia flash presentations

Abstract

Providing appropriate context is vital for student learning. An excellent way of achieving this is via case studies of actual engineering projects conducted in industry. If students are exposed to actual engineering projects and the skills / knowledge that are required in order complete such projects, they are likely to be more motivated to learn the associated theory. One way of achieving this is to develop short multimedia presentations of industry case studies that highlight different aspects of engineering practice. The advantage of capturing the case studies in this format is that once they have been developed, they can be used repeatedly and in different contexts. This paper describes the process for developing such case studies and provides an example application in a second year environmental engineering course in the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering at the University of Adelaide.