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Interactive textbooks generate big data through student reading participation, including animations, question sets, and auto-graded homework. Animations are multi-step, dynamic visuals with text captions. By dividing new content into smaller chunks of information, student engagement is expected to be high, which aligns with tenets of cognitive load theory. Specifically, students’ clicks are recorded and measure usage, completion, and view time per step and for entire animations. Animation usage data from an interactive textbook for a chemical engineering course in Material and Energy Balances accounts for 60,000 animation views across 140+ unique animations. Data collected across five cohorts between 2016 and 2020 used various metrics to capture animation usage including watch and re-watch rates as well as the length of animation views. Variations in view rate and time were examined across content, parsed by book chapter, and five animation characterizations (Concept, Derivation, Figures and Plots, Physical World, and Spreadsheets). Important findings include: 1) Animation views were at or above 100% for all chapters and cohorts, 2) Median view time varies from 22 s (2-step) to 59 s (6-step) - a reasonable attention span for students and cognitive load, 3) Median view time for animations characterized as Derivation was the longest (40 s) compared to Physical World animations, which resulted in the shortest time (20 s).
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Attitudes Toward and Usage of Animations in an Interactive Textbook for Material and Energy Balances
Attitudes Toward and Usage of Animations in an Interactive Textbook for Material and Energy Balances Abstract The concept of active learning or “learning by doing” is applied to animations within an interactive textbook in this contribution. A Material and Energy Balance (MEB) course for undergraduate chemical engineering students has generated large data sets by using an interactive textbook from zyBooks. MEB is a foundational course that includes new terminology, the basic principles of mass and energy conservation, and tools for problem solving. Here, outside of class engagement is measured using student views of multi-step animations that introduce MEB concepts in small chunks. Students usage of the interactive textbook have been logged for several years and reading participation was measured as high as 99% by median. Within the reading participation data are the clicks to start, complete, and re-watch over 100 animations across the book, which has not been explored in detail. This paper addresses research questions specifically related to animations. First, do students complete viewing an interactive animation and what is the rate of re-watch? Next, do certain animations gather re-watch views across several cohorts? Also, what is students’ understanding and attitude about using animations in their engineering education? We will administer pre- and post-surveys to understand students’ interest in chemical engineering as well as animation use.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2025088
- PAR ID:
- 10289619
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASEE Annual Meeting
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--36728
