Abstract:

Technical engineers consider communication and writing skills to be among the most difficult aspects of their profession. Communication courses, however, are expensive, because teaching takes place in tutorials in which students are given feedback regularly. Therefore a computer assisted practicum has been designed. The practicum aims to diminish the amount of lecturer effort while increasing student participation through the interactive and user-friendly courseware Ganesh. The program (in Dutch) consists of two modules: 1) a report module, which offers examples of and criteria for the standard components of technical reports; 2) a style module, which discusses subjects such as sentence complexity, use of examples, use of connectives, spelling, etc. In both modules the student can opt for additional examples or exercises via buttons, menus and hypertext paths. In this paper we would like to discuss some of the characteristics of the program and the results of a test we performed last spring.

Author: Bas Andeweg, Sabine Kunst