Learner Adaptation To Digital Libraries By Engineering Students

This paper examines how digital libraries (DL) may be integrated into the learning resources of engineering students. The advent of digital libraries has opened revolutionary opportunities in engineering education. The diversity of resources offers rich opportunities to enhance engineering education, providing access to data, codes, problems and information that are far beyond what each individual teacher has time to develop. However, students are largely unaware of the DL resources, as well as the most efficient manner to utilize them. Learners still require a disciplined study scheme and expert guidance to select and convert information to lasting knowledge. To complicate matters further, professors are hindered by the lack of systematic knowledge on the attitudes, skills, and learning styles of students. This problem is most acute at for students at the freshman through graduate levels in advanced engineering programs. This paper lays out the problems and provides initial results on how students are accessing internetbased material in engineering courses, as well as ideas for improving their ability to reach the best problem-solving resources.