Peter Vial

This paper describes in detail a successful training program developed for sessional (part-time or non-permanent) laboratory demonstrators employed in the Electrical Engineering Department of an Australian university. Such demonstrators play an important role in teaching practical concepts and skills in engineering. The success of the program relies on a centralized approach coordinated by a carefully selected Laboratory Manager, responsible for the recruitment, allocation, training and development of sessional teachers, and for assessing student satisfaction with them. The paper examines the overall impact of the program on these teachers’: 1) introducing laboratory material; 2) preparation; 3) communication; 4) interest in student learning; 5) ability to respond to questions; and 6) overall effectiveness. Sessional teacher satisfaction with the training program is also examined and the data was used to inform the program’s further development. The results show that the training program successfully improved the demonstrators' teaching skills and thus led to greater satisfaction and hence learning experience of both students and demonstrators.

BACKGROUND OR CONTEXT
Teamwork is an integral component of any engineering degree, but students often have difficulty organising team meetings outside of class times due to discrepancies in their individual study timetables as well as their family and work commitments. Rich-media synchronous online technologies such as video/web conferencing and virtual worlds can be used to help address this problem by enabling anyplace, anytime interaction, while at the same time mirroring the communication modes students will encounter in their future workplaces. However, not much is known about how these technologies compare with one another for facilitating different types of collaborative learning task and in terms of their student-perceived affordances.

PURPOSE OR GOAL
In this study, the researchers sought to elicit student perceptions of and experiences using
Adobe Connect, a 2D web conferencing application with video capabilities, and iSee, a hybrid desktop video conferencing and 3D virtual world environment. The goal was to examine, from a user standpoint, the appropriateness and efficacy of these software platforms for supporting student-directed project team meetings. Such research is of value to the academic community because it is important for educators and students to be able to make informed decisions about the modalities to be used for collaboration and concept representation, since these can impact heavily upon the effectiveness with which joint meaning-making and knowledge co-construction occur.

APPROACH
A quasi-experimental approach was adopted in which half of the student teams in a project based engineering subject were assigned to use Adobe Connect and the remaining half were assigned to use iSee for their online team meetings. The research design was specifically targeted at identifying differences that might exist between the Connect and iSee users in terms of: (a) time required to learn the software; (b) perceived ease of use; (c) perceived communicative affordances; (d) perceived enablement of co-presence, user/information representation, and collaboration; and (e) overall satisfaction. An end-of-semester survey was used to gather data from students relating to each of these aspects and to facilitate between-groups comparisons.

DISCUSSION
Basic measures of central tendency pointed to iSee requiring less time to learn and being easier to use than Adobe Connect, but the differences observed were not statistically significant at the .05 alpha level. The survey data pertaining to perceived communicative affordances similarly tended to favour iSee, but the differences were again not statistically significant. However, iSee was rated as being effective at fostering co-presence and enabling collaboration by more students who used it than was the case for Connect, at a level approaching significance (p = .090). A significantly higher proportion of iSee users than
Connect users said they would recommend the use of the software for student team meetings (p = .035), which can be seen as early evidence that iSee, with its combination of
3D spatial interaction and video-based communication capabilities, lent itself to a more productive and enjoyable online collaboration experience within the application context.

ABSTRACT This paper describes in detail a successful training program developed for sessional (part-time or nonpermanent) laboratory demonstrators employed in the Electrical Engineering Department of an Australian university. Such demonstrators play an important role in teaching practical concepts and skills in engineering. The success of the program relies on a centralized approach coordinated by a carefully selected Laboratory Manager responsible for the recruitment, allocation, training, and development of sessional teachers, and for assessing student satisfaction with them. The paper examines the overall impact of the program on these teachers': 1) introducing laboratory material; 2) preparation; 3) communication; 4) interest in student learning; 5) ability to respond to questions; and 6) overall effectiveness. Sessional teacher satisfaction with the training program is also examined, and the data were used to inform the program's further development. The results show that the training program successfully improved the demonstrators' teaching skills and thus led to greater satisfaction and hence learning experience of both students and demonstrators.

A laboratory component of an undergraduate telecommunications course consistently scored poorly for student learning experience on student surveys at an Australian university. Consultation with experienced academic staff revealed the need to modify the teaching resources available for the laboratory to include web-based multimedia and interactive resources. This new material was developed and made available to students and teaching staff in early 2011 via an Australian university e-learning package, which was used to deliver the subject. The students and demonstrators were then encouraged to use this new resource to prepare for the three-hour laboratory sessions. Surveys of students who took this laboratory in previous years were then compared to surveys of students using the latest version of the telecommunications laboratory in 2011 and 2012. The demonstrators themselves were also asked to provide feedback on their impressions of student learning. The comments from the laboratory demonstrators, feedback from the students, and assessment results indicate that the new online teaching material for both laboratory teaching staff and students has significantly improved the student learning experience. That this occurred two years in a row indicates that this improvement has ongoing benefits, irrespective of the teaching staff involved with the subject. The lessons learned can be applied to other similar learning environments.

ABSTRACT In this study we propose using Ultra Wideband Channel measurements to detect the presence of different substances between the antennas. This technique takes advantage of the large number of frequencies which an Ultra Wideband signal occupies. We propose two methods to detect differences in channel magnitude frequency responses when in the presence of different substances between the transmitting and receiving UWB antennas. We then take preliminary measurements and fit a curve of best fit to the processed data. The preliminary results indicate that this technique may be able to be used in conjunction with data mining techniques to detect the presence of different substances between the antennas. This potentially provides a non-destructive technique to measure different substances in the wireless medium between the two UWB antennas.

ABSTRACT In this paper, we develop a Software Defined Radio (SDR) test bed to evaluate the Multiple Access Interference (MAI) effects over SISO and 2×MIMO systems. It can be observed that under asynchronous transmissions, the Gold code leads to the best performance over both systems due to the fact that it has the best correlation properties. We also find the MAI effects in terms of the spreading sequences pairs on MIMO-STS systems. We propose a criterion for selecting promising spreading sequences for MIMO systems. Based on the measured results, we identify pairs of spreading sequences which have improved BER compared to other pairs in the same set of spreading sequences. We infer that the choice of spreading sequence pairs in a MIMO-STS system in the presence of MAI sources is an important factor to be considered.

ABSTRACT This study investigates the effect of multiple sources using STS across a Time-Hopping-PPM Modulation that is over an UWB Saleh-Valenzuela channel with each source using two transmit antennas. We model and analyze this system, showing that the presence of such MAI results in a significant degradation in BER performance. Simulation results show that for strong signal strength of interfering MAI signals degradation in BER performance is observed for the cases where we have five and 10 distinct MAI sources present when using Walsh-Hadamard thirty two chip spreading sequences. Using simulation, we investigate the use of other sets of orthogonal spreading sequences with improved cross correlation properties and find that for some sequences a significant improvement is seen compared to Walsh-Hadamard sequences when they are similarly misaligned. We show that MAI degrades the BER performance of such systems and that selection of improved cross correlation spreading code sequence sets improves BER.

The laboratory plays an important role in teaching engineering skills. An Electrical Engineering department at an Australian University implemented a reform to monitor and improve student satisfaction with the teaching laboratories. A Laboratory Manager was employed to oversee the quality of twenty-seven courses containing instructional laboratories. Student satisfaction surveys were carried out on all relevant laboratories every year and the data was used for continuous improvement.  This paper will investigate the reforms that were implemented and outline a number of the improvements made. It also examines the program’s overall impact on: 1) overall satisfaction; 2) laboratory notes; 3) learning experiences; 4) computer facilities; 5) engineering equipment; and 6) condition of the laboratory. Student satisfaction with the laboratories increased by 32% between 2007 and 2013. The results show that the laboratory notes (activity and clarity), and the quality of the equipment used are among the most influential factors on student satisfaction. In particular, it is important to have notes or resources that explain in some detail how to use and troubleshoot equipment and software used in the laboratory