Coastal Navigation is an advanced course at OCSC. It is taught exclusively in the classroom over eight three-hour sessions. Once properly learned, the practice of navigating along a coast is not particularly difficult. But teaching the concepts in a classroom where it's hard to see the effects of current, for example, presents special challenges. One of the more difficult challenges is teaching students how to incorporate real-time events into their course plotting. Accordingly, the homework for OCSC's Coastal Navigation course places a lot of emphasis on plotting courses and positions on charts. Students get the weekly homework problems and answers so they can check their work before the next class session. Even so, the first part of most classes is often taken up with questions about the homework. OCSC decided to create an electronic version of the Coastal Navigation homework for two reasons. First, it seemed clear that interactive homework materials would be superior to printed materials. Students could see the chart work being done step-by-step, with explanations, rather than just having a photocopied chart excerpt with the final plot. Second, OCSC thought it might eventually market its Coastal Navigation course as a stand-alone product. In putting the e-learning version of this homework together, I decided that Acrobat offered the best solution. Students are expected to work through the homework on their own, then check the answers, and only then, if they have questions or problems, refer to the supplemental materials. I used layers in Adobe InDesign to create each step of the plotting process, exported those to Acrobat, then used Acrobat's Bookmark feature to toggle the visibility of each layer, thereby revealing in turn each step of the solution. Below is a sample of one homework assignment from OCSC's Coastal Navigation course. It includes the problems, answers, and interactive chart solutions.
[Note: This course is made up entirely of Adobe Acrobat documents. Browsers require the Acrobat Viewer plug-in to view the documents in the browser. Downloading the document to your desktop will not work, as the the links to the chart solutions will be broken. If you are unable to view the chart solutions, I can supply a cd with the relevant files for proper viewing.] |
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