Panteleo: Hello!
And welcome to Science World.
Kaw: We have developed many many different types of resources for the same topic so the students have the
opportunity of learning the material in the fashion they want to.
Panteleo: He is now a U.S. Engineering professor but back in college in India, Autar Kaw had
to share textbooks with other students.
He is taking that experience and today he is offering a free online educational resource
that contains a variety of reading materials.
Guess what?
When Autar Kaw was a young man attending college in his native India, he, like many college
students, did not have much money.
Which meant he had limited access to necessary but expensive textbooks.
Today, Autar Kaw is a Mechanical Engineering professor at the University of South Florida,
but he never forgot the hardships that he faced during the early years of college.
To help students with limited financial resources Professor Kaw has created a free online resource
called Holistic Numerical Methods.
Now, Numerical Methods is a core college course for many Engineering students and is an approach
in mathematics that allows scientists and engineers to arrive at approximate solutions
for problems they cannot solve exactly or would take too long to solve.
Professor Kaw joins us for this week’s one-on-one segment to talk about the unique online collection
of college courseware he developed and what it offers to college students around the world.
I guess the first thing I’d like to ask you, professor, is you’ve developed a free
open courseware resource called Holistic Numerical Methods can you explain what this is and what
does it involve?
Kaw: It is a core course, which we teach in Engineering, it is called numerical methods.
It is a course about solving mathematical problems approximately because most of the
Engineering and Science problems cannot be solved exactly so this is what I want to get
the students into used to.
And what we have done for the last eleven or twelve years develop this open courseware
and what we have done is that we have developed many many different types of resources for
the same topic so that students have the opportunity of learning the material in the fashion they
want to.
And now the good thing about the resource is that it has been rated by several universities,
it has been assessed formally by about four universities so that we can see that it works
with different types of students whether they belong to a large university or a small one,
or different racial backgrounds and gender, and so on and so forth.
Panteleo: Who is this available to?
Kaw: It is available to anybody in the world.
We put no restrictions we do not even ask a person to log in or give us a password or
anything like that and that is the beauty of it because if you take out all the stumbling
blocks of getting a resource - it can be as simple as even having to log in or put in
a password.
I find that more people are willing to use the source.
Panteleo: Is there a cost involved with this?
Kaw: No, there is no cost.
Panteleo: So it is absolutely free?
Kaw: Absolutely free.
Panteleo: Now, what can a web visitor expect to find at your site?
Kaw: If they are taking a course in numerical methods they can use it as a complimentary
resource.
So if they are going to the classroom, they can go back into their dorms or into their
homes and watch me do a YouTube lecture on the same topic which their instructor is teaching
them.
They can take multiple choice question quizzes on the web itself and it gives them feedback
right away.
They can look at a PowerPoint presentation, they can look at some anecdotal information
about a particular numerical method, they can also look at real world examples that
are used to illustrate why in the first place do we need different numerical methods.
Panteleo: I understand that the basis of your courseware comes from a very personal experience
Kaw: I went to undergraduate school in India, it was way back in the mid 1970s.
We used to have these books which we had to use as textbooks but some of these textbooks
were written by American authors and they’ll be extremely expensive for an Indian student
to buy.
So, the library would keep a few books which we could check out for the whole semester
but three or four students would have to share that book.
So since in a small college, tests were all given on the same day, people would have to
come up with a timetable that you us it from two to four, I use it from four to six, and
things like that.
So it impacted how well we learned a particular material.
Panteleo: Does this courseware that you’ve developed correspond with any particular class
or college curriculum?
Is it used with any particular course or class offered by colleges?
Kaw: Yes, the course is called Numerical Methods and it is a core class, not for all Engineering
majors but for engineering majors like Mechanical, Civil, in some cases Electrical and Computer
Engineering.
They teach the core class.
So if you go to any engineering school, about half of the engineering students will have
to take that course.
Panteleo: What do you consider to be the most important components of developing online
courseware or classes?
Kaw: You have to give the student an opportunity of learning the same thing via different modes.
So, that could be a video, a textbook chapter, that could be some anecdotal information.
So, once you give these multiple context opportunities, it has been proven by evidence-based research
that people learn it better and it also stays in their long-term memory better.
Panteleo: That was Professor Autar Kaw, who teaches Mechanical Engineering at the University
of South Florida in Tampa, Florida.
If you want to learn more about Professor Kaw’s free online educational resource check
out his website at nm.MathForCollege.com.
(Outro music) Panteleo: That is it for this edition of Science
world, thanks so much for listening!
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