Engineering technology technical courses often have both lecture and accompanying laboratory sessions. The laboratory assignments reinforce the understanding of the topics studied during the lecture sessions. A planning grant was awarded from the National Science Foundation through their Bridges for Engineering Education Program to develop technology-enabled content in engineering science courses. Content was developed to appeal to a variety of learning styles and to support student-centered learning. This paper will describe the content development and delivery and discuss the impact it had on engineering technology education. Course / Content Development Content was developed to support a course in Flexible Automation offered in the College of Applied Science. The content was developed collaboratively among educational technology experts in the College of Engineering, faculty from the College of Applied Science, and experts in instructional design in the College of Education. The project sought to develop content that would appeal to a variety of student learning styles and thus better engage the students in the learning process 1 . The various modes of instruction developed during the project were categorized as: • Read It – text and illustrations to appeal to visual learners / linguistic learners • Watch It – streaming media presentation to appeal to visual learners / auditory learners • Visualize It – animations to appeal to spatial learners / visual learners • Try It – active exercises to appeal to kinesthetic learners / active learners Guidelines based on models of best practice 2,3 were established for content creation to ensure instructional design appropriate for technology-mediated education was used. These guidelines were developed by the collaborators from the College of Education and the participating faculty. Each of the instructional modalities listed above had an associated content development guideline. These guidelines are shown in Figures 1 4. With these guidelines in place, material was developed by graduate assistants working with faculty, instructional designers, and the project manager. The new materials were developed to be a supplement and / or extension of the “traditional” materials and to be delivered via the web or CD-Rom. Animations and active exercises were derived from materials presented in the textbooks to be consistent with that resource. Streaming media presentations and web-based text and graphics were derived from both the course text and other standard texts to provide a richer educational resource. P ge 10249.1 Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education Figure 1 “Try It” Content Development Guidelines Technology-Enabled Engineering Science Content “Try It” Content Development Guidelines This module allows students to interact with the content to the greatest degree possible. It is intended to support active learning and student inquiry. Module contains: 1. Description of the content of the section and a procedure for using the module 2. Physical model and a graphic representation 3. Interactive exercise that allows students to manipulate variables and see the outcomes of this manipulation 4. Discussion of what happens for each interaction 5. Discussion of the underlying principles Description A brief summary of the topic covered (e.g. stress), a cross reference to the section in the textbook, and an explanation of how the module works. This explanation should provide clear instructions on how parameters are manipulated and how the student receives feedback. The explanation should also inform students of any options they have and how to get help if they need it. Models To provide a real world context, the module should first introduce a familiar concept or situation for which the topic is applicable (e.g., a bridge). A graphical representation such as a free body diagram should then be shown. Interactive Exercise Students are able to change various aspects of the model and see the results of these manipulations. Clarity is very important – there must be an understandable connection between cause and effect. What Happened An explanation of the cause and effect should be given (e.g., increasing the load on the bridge caused the stress to increase). Underlying Principles The cause and effect discussed above should be related to the underlying principles being presented. This will typically be an explanation of the governing equations and which variables in the equations were involved in the manipulations.