The grant will help the University of Canterbury’s College of Engineering to implement an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for 500 students studying Mechanical Engineering. The project team consists of Dr Antonija Mitrovic, the project leader, Dr Charles Fleischmann and Dr Brent Martin.
To be eligible for the grant, the university had to demonstrate it could use mobile technology to transform teaching and learning models to positively impact student learning. The University of Canterbury entered the ITS solution with the support of HP New Zealand – a founding partner in the NZ ICT Innovation Institute, which is being established at the University.
The ITS replaces traditional tutorials where students present homework to a tutor by using artificial intelligence to simulate one-on-one tutoring that improves the students’ problem-solving skills when applying the fundamental Newtonian mechanics to engineering examples.
Jeff Healey, corporate enterprise marketing manager, HP New Zealand says HP considers the University of Canterbury is a deserving recipient of the HP Technology for Teaching grant as the ITS project will transform teaching and will “help create the classroom of tomorrow, today, on its campus.”
The HP Technology for Teaching Initiative is aimed at supporting the development of mobile technology in higher education, to transform teaching and learning models; integrate learning technology into campuses; engage faculty in adopting and implementing these models; and foster opportunities for academic leaders to understand the potential of mobile technology in university environments, he says.
Five universities in Asia Pacific will receive a total of US$350,000 in grants to integrate mobility technology and infrastructure campus-wide. They are Anna University and Jadavpur University, of India; the University of Tokyo; Yonsei University of Korea; and the University of Canterbury. The winners were picked from a field of 15 universities from the region that were invited to take part.
Each university will receive approximately US$70,000 worth of technology such as HP Tablet PCs, external storage and optical drives, wireless networking cards and printers, as well as a stipend for staff to work on the projects, which have to be completed in 15 months.
