The impact of blended learning in improving the reaction, achievement and return on investment of industrial automation training

There has been a significant increase in the level of remote or distance learning using the Internet, often referred to as e-learning or online education. E-learning is often combined with classroom instruction and on-the-job training and this is referred to as blended learning. The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact blended learning has in improving engineering training in the engineering field of industrial automation. This is especially in improving the reaction, achievement and return on investment of learners compared to that of only the traditional classroom or e-learning approaches. One of the gaps in current research is the examination of the impact of blended learning in improving engineering training. The research revealed significant growth in the use of e-learning for engineers and technicians. There would however appear to be a large number of engineers and technicians who were disappointed with their experiences of e-learning. Significant concerns were also identified in the efficacy of e-learning and the lack of hands-on experience in this form of training for engineers and technicians. Suggestions are made as a result of the research into addressing these issues

Automatic Lecture Recording

Lecture recording has become a very common tool to provide students with additional media for their examination preparations. While its effort has to stay reasonable, only a very basic way of recording is done in many cases. Therefore, watching the resulting videos can get very boring completely independent of how interesting the original topic or session was. This thesis proposes a new approach to lecture recordings by letting distributed computers emulate the work of a human camera team, which is the natural way of creating attractive recordings. This thesis is structured in six chapters, starting with the examination of the current situation, and taking its constraints into account. The first chapter concludes with a reflection on related work. Chapter two is about the design of our prototype system. It is deduced from a human camera team in the real world which gets transferred into the virtual world. Finally, a detailed overview about all parts necessary for our prototype and their planned functionality is given. In chapter three, the implementation of all parts and tasks and the incidents occurring during implementation are described in detail. Chapter four describes the technical experiences made with the different parts during development, testing and evaluation with a view to functionality, performance, and an proposal towards future work. The evaluation of the whole system with students is presented and discussed in the fifth chapter. Chapter six concludes this thesis by summing up the facts and gives an outlook on future work