The impact of the WWW on engineering education

The rapid growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) is changing the way students learn and the way that they demonstrate their learning. Engineering educators are beginning to use the Web as a vehicle for the presentation of both basic and supplemental materials for the instruction process. In addition, a wide range of engineering resources is available to students through searches on the Internet. Many students are being asked to use the Internet as a means of presenting their engineering designs and assignments. The graphical and nonlinear format of the Internet provides many new ways of presenting and organizing data that could not easily be accomplished with conventional methods. A big problem that students and faculty are facing is that the ease of publishing on the Web is creating data overload. No longer does one need to go through the process of finding a publisher and sending a book or article through a review process before publication. Students must address the issue of evaluating the worth of material that they find in their searches and must also consider the value of what they have produced for public dissemination. We have sought to assess the effect that publishing on the Web has on the student´s ability to critically interpret the materials that they gather from the Web