Computer aided teaching in civil engineering materials science at the University of Stuttgart

During the past five years the Institute of Construction Materials at the University of Stuttgart (IWB) has participated in different projects concerning e-teaching. Amongst other efforts co-workers of IWB have created a set of virtual content concerning concrete technology within a German e-teaching network in civil engineering materials science called “WiBA-Net” (http://www.wiba-net.de). The content of this network consists of teaching material that is organized at four different levels of granularity. At the most basic level single items (“assets”) are collected. At the second level such assets are arranged into single pages filling one screen. Several pages dealing with aspects of a single topic are ordered into a teaching path at the third level and finally a set of teaching paths forms an entire course at level four. Virtual searching methods are offered on all four levels depending on the state of the user. Besides the mentioned teaching material also virtual communication facilities are offered within the network. During the work on WiBA-Net, which consists of six German Universities, questions concerning the reusability of virtual content, metadata enhancement techniques and the concept of Blended Learning were focused. Educational and didactic aspects have been closely taken into account and quality assuring evaluation methods have been applied.Meanwhile first experiences have been made in real life teaching and learning situations, which give us an idea of future needs and development in the field.