Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 920 de 957
MindBook consists of three types of file: a mindmap file, an XML file, and learning resource
files. A mindmap file describes the structure of a tree, which has color, font, size and
location attributes of its nodes. A XML file has chapters, sections and questions as its
nodes, and the connections between related nodes. It defines the sequence in which
sections of the learning modules are displayed in digital textbooks, and it contains the path
of learning resources and the level of understanding. Learning resources are text, image,
movie or hyper link format. The level icons (1-12) on the toolbar that runs down the left
hand side of the tool include level priority such that they can be used by the authors as an
important direction in the development of a proper learning model. Icons (1-4) are given
by textbook publisher (professional textbook authors), icons (5-8) are used by
lecturers/teachers and icons (9-12) are inserted by industrial experts. If a topic has many
icons, it will be considered as important by different authors. If the level of knowledge is
equal to or higher than the threshold (for example 9) which is considered an important
topic in a real-world, a real-world basis application can be run in accordance to an
industrial expert.
Each XML file is equivalent to one digital textbook. The digital library manages the
information about all digital textbook that are being created. The overall structure of the
authoring tool is shown in Figure 3.
User Study
Figure 3: Overall structure of the authoring tool
We have used MindBook to generate digital textbooks collaboratively for the engineering
curriculum. We performed a study to investigate the usability of the tool. 29authors (20
lecturers, 5 industrial experts, 2 instructional designers and 2 multimedia developers) in
the field of curriculum development participated in our survey. We gave them a short
tutorial, demonstrating how edit the mind map and its’ resources. After the tutorial, they
were asked to insert 5 new topics and 3 resources for their topic and level. The
participants were required to set proper attributes (resources) on the node they newly
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011