Solved Problems of Electromagnetics as Educational Material on the Web: Development, Interest of Students and Future Approaches

 Web-based learning tools are indispensable in modern teaching, especially when the ability to reveal extra information on demand is an excellent tool for stimulating and engaging students. The complexity of problems from the field of Electromagnetics makes understanding and study difficult for students. Visualization of phenomena, animations synchronized with corresponding derivation of equations, sound and other multimedia elements allow students to better understand the topics and to gain some practical experience even without accomplishment laboratory experiments. The department of Electromagnetics at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, offered its first educational contents from the course in Fundamentals of Electromagnetics over the Web in 1998, and has since been actively involved in its maintenance and improvement. Our digital library includes approximately 1000 solved problems and is permanently growing. The evaluation of website access, carried out by analyzing the web server log files, revealed a great and still increasing interest for this educational material among Slovenian students. Explored students’ navigational behavior will be used to identify their interests, enhance the quality and facilitate delivery of information services, and improve the server’s performance. Our experience is based on several attempts to publish technical sketches and mathematical notations from the field of Electromagnetics on the Web. At the beginning, solved problems were published using static HTML and GIF images. At the end of 1999, when the Web site was also restructured into a portal, the Acrobat PDF format has been used for publishing similar contents. Previously described student interest motivated us to search for new approach for publishing chapters and this way extend the educational process by using animation synchronized by corresponding equations, sound and other multimedia elements using state-of-the-art technologies. We would like to share our experience with developing dynamic interactive multimedia educational material with integrated mathematical notation, because we believe such an application is not limited to the field of Electromagnetics and could be useful in other fields of science and technology. Index Terms  Education, Electromagnetics, Equations, Mathematical Notations, Number of Hits, Solved Problems, Technical Sketches, World Wide Web.