NUCLEAR ENGINEERING EDUCATION IN THE FUTURE

摘要

The phrase “going to college” may mean something totally new and different in the future. It could meanrnhooking up your laptop whereever you happen to be and whatever time is convenient for you to performrnthe next series of lessons for whatever curriculum you have undertaken at your chosen virtual university.rnThis idea may seem somewhat farfetched, but it is happening now. Students may take college coursesrnthrough distance education which includes videotape (asynchronous communication), live video/audiornvia high speed transmission lines such as ISDN or TI (synchronous communication), and the currentrninternet which includes both synchronous and asynchronous web-based components.rnElectronic distance education in engineering at the University of Tennesse (UT) began over 25 years agornwith videotape courses supplemented by telephone calls from students to professors. About ten years agornthe UT Nuclear Engineering Dept. presented its nuclear criticality safety courses via live teleconferencernfrom Oak Ridge, TN to Portsmouth, OH and Paducah, KY. More recently, we have presented arncriticality safety course from the UT main campus in Knoxville, TN to nuclear engineering students atrnNorth Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. While the technology for live real time communicationrnis improving, it is still lacking somewhat in both quality and reliability.rnAt present, we are using a combination of all distance education mechanisms currently availabe tornconvert our courses, both undergraduate and graduate, from the traditional on campus classroomrnpresentation to distance education courses. We are just beginning this endeavor and much remains to berndone. We would like to offer most of our B.S. nuclear engineering courses to distance students in orderrnto increase our undergraduate enrollment. Laboratory based courses will be the last to convert, but evenrnthese courses should eventually be available in a virtual manner.rnWhile many distance education courses will ultimately be available asynchronously, it is my personalrnopinion that real time interaction between instructors and students will always be a necessary part ofrnsome courses in order to have a truly high quality educational experience. Students will missrnspontaneous “war stories” and other valuable personal experiences of the instructors if everything isrnasynchronous. Thus, I prefer to have both, synchronous and asynchronous components, in mostrnengineering courses. The synchronous part for distance students should eventually be like the TV gamernshow “Hollywood Squares” where the instructor sees and hears all of the students, and each student seesrnand hears all of the other students as well as the instructor in a live real time information exchange. Inrnsuch an environment, the students may not be able to notice that their instructor has on one blue sock andrnone brown sock, but then nothing is perfect including distance education.