Framework for effective utilization of e-content in engineering education

Even though lot of useful content is available on the Internet that is relevant to engineering courses, the scattered nature of the content being available from different websites, wastage of time in finding the right content, absence of any mechanism that certifies the correctness of the accessed content, different levels of the content on a given topic, too-lengthy non-interactive text content, are some of the problems faced by learners, in using this available content. In this context it is important to have a system that can direct the learner to right content, which is presented in an easily understandable manner, with virtual experimentation options wherever applicable, along with appropriate assessments carried out to certify the assessed. In this backdrop, a framework is proposed in this paper that can offer the details of e-content, in terms of its type, relevance, level, correctness, extent of coverage, and usage statistics. By making this info available from authenticated portals like University websites, updating it frequently by sharing information from similar other portals, taking into account the user feedbacks and subject experts' ratings to decide the content quality, learners can be enabled to access good quality e-content in less time and effort. Software agents similar to citation agents are proposed to be used for collecting the details from multiple sites in Internet. For assessment also, the software clients that run on content pages can bring the result of such assessments to the portals where the data belonging to such other previous assessments taken by the user were also stored to offer assessment scores of the learner over a period of time on multiple subjects and skills. Overall, this system can reduce the burden of the learner in accessing the required content and can make his learning more interesting by having competitive learning with online assessments and credits obtained thereon.