Belshazzar: A Simple Tool For Creating And Publishing Voice Annotated Drawings On The Web

Engineering faculty are often discouraged by the challenges of participating in distance learning, or incorporating on-line learning approaches in their courses. A particularly important challenge is the time-, skill-, and resource-intensive endeavor of producing web-based content for students. This is particularly true in engineering and scientific and mathematically-based disciplines, where much of the content involves representing concepts through diagrams and equations. While the tools for electronic production of text-based content are well-developed and very easy to use, the production of more technologically sophisticated content needed to represent engineering concepts is much more challenging. For example, suppose a student in an introductory circuits course is having trouble conceptualizing reducing a circuit to its Thevenin equivalent. With pencil and paper during face-to-face interaction, the instructor could illustrate and explain the problem solving process. In contrast, producing a web-based resource to accomplish the same purpose would be a very time-consuming ordeal, typically requiring skill with sophisticated software tools.