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2016 ASEE Rocky Mountain Section Conference
The engineering department intends to find more efficient ways when developing the course
material. For example, if time is an issue in developing video content, then a team of instructors
could spend their time researching, leveraging and curating other videos found on YouTube.
However, some of the top engineering schools, have posted some of their traditional 45-minute
or one hour lectures on YouTube, so viewing these videos will take time for both instructors and
students. The CTU engineering department chose to develop their own content to suit its online
needs of instruction for a particular course and when appropriate, leverage videos uploaded on
YouTube or other video content providers. Since some portions of an hour-long YouTube video
may not be relevant for the course, then it would be helpful to have video players to start and
stop at the appropriate place. Investigation of video players having these type of features
developed from the internet marketing niche as well as the viewer engagement features from
YouTube, will be discussed later in this paper as well.
Because studying engineering is very challenging for most students, especially when learning the
technical content online, the delivery of the course needs to reward self-motivated students with
quality content and instruction to keep students engaged in the learning process throughout the
engineering program. Taking a long-term strategic view, eventually all engineering courses will
be delivered online while ground campuses are for those in the local community who prefer
some face-to-face instruction.
Content Generation for Multimedia Ebooks Using Camtasia plus YouTube
Back in 2003, Professor Santiago’s initial and continuing interest is the creation of interactive
and multimedia ebooks. He found software that converted a website having multimedia content
into a standalone ebook. However, he quickly discovered that creating the multimedia content
takes more time than he anticipated and that the file size of an ebook is very large to download or
email during that time. However, with the birth of YouTube and the use of its embedding video
feature, the file size of the ebook can be significantly reduced. For example, one set of videos
for ‘Introduction to Engineering’ had a file size of 112 Mb for a particular learning module…too
large to be sent to IT personnel at Chicago as an email attachment. Uploading the videos on
YouTube and embedding them within PowerPoint slide resulted in a file size of 1.2 MB. This
technique is about a 93-fold file size reduction which is small enough to email as an attachment.
The embedded video technique can be adapted used to provide personalized instruction for those
students who request help through email. .
Professor Santiago’s educational efforts on YouTube also led to publishing a reference book in
circuit analysis2. During 2012, a literary agent contacted him after the agent researched and
discovered Professor Santiago’s YouTube videos leading to publishing his book in April 2013.
Future plans include producing a similar book having multimedia or a video-based companion
website. Based on this experience, course exercises could include students to upload YouTube
videos about their laboratory experiments or capstone project. These videos can be used later as
part of their electronic portfolio as they complete their engineering program.
Professor Santiago also investigated on the use of Adobe Acrobat. Unfortunately, he discovered
Adobe pdf books currently do not allow embedded YouTube videos. Although, there is some
third-party widget software that allows the integration, it requires more technical expertise to
integrate the YouTube videos into pdf formatted books but is not particularly visually pleasing
© American Society for Engineering Education, 2016
The engineering department intends to find more efficient ways when developing the course
material. For example, if time is an issue in developing video content, then a team of instructors
could spend their time researching, leveraging and curating other videos found on YouTube.
However, some of the top engineering schools, have posted some of their traditional 45-minute
or one hour lectures on YouTube, so viewing these videos will take time for both instructors and
students. The CTU engineering department chose to develop their own content to suit its online
needs of instruction for a particular course and when appropriate, leverage videos uploaded on
YouTube or other video content providers. Since some portions of an hour-long YouTube video
may not be relevant for the course, then it would be helpful to have video players to start and
stop at the appropriate place. Investigation of video players having these type of features
developed from the internet marketing niche as well as the viewer engagement features from
YouTube, will be discussed later in this paper as well.
Because studying engineering is very challenging for most students, especially when learning the
technical content online, the delivery of the course needs to reward self-motivated students with
quality content and instruction to keep students engaged in the learning process throughout the
engineering program. Taking a long-term strategic view, eventually all engineering courses will
be delivered online while ground campuses are for those in the local community who prefer
some face-to-face instruction.
Content Generation for Multimedia Ebooks Using Camtasia plus YouTube
Back in 2003, Professor Santiago’s initial and continuing interest is the creation of interactive
and multimedia ebooks. He found software that converted a website having multimedia content
into a standalone ebook. However, he quickly discovered that creating the multimedia content
takes more time than he anticipated and that the file size of an ebook is very large to download or
email during that time. However, with the birth of YouTube and the use of its embedding video
feature, the file size of the ebook can be significantly reduced. For example, one set of videos
for ‘Introduction to Engineering’ had a file size of 112 Mb for a particular learning module…too
large to be sent to IT personnel at Chicago as an email attachment. Uploading the videos on
YouTube and embedding them within PowerPoint slide resulted in a file size of 1.2 MB. This
technique is about a 93-fold file size reduction which is small enough to email as an attachment.
The embedded video technique can be adapted used to provide personalized instruction for those
students who request help through email. .
Professor Santiago’s educational efforts on YouTube also led to publishing a reference book in
circuit analysis2. During 2012, a literary agent contacted him after the agent researched and
discovered Professor Santiago’s YouTube videos leading to publishing his book in April 2013.
Future plans include producing a similar book having multimedia or a video-based companion
website. Based on this experience, course exercises could include students to upload YouTube
videos about their laboratory experiments or capstone project. These videos can be used later as
part of their electronic portfolio as they complete their engineering program.
Professor Santiago also investigated on the use of Adobe Acrobat. Unfortunately, he discovered
Adobe pdf books currently do not allow embedded YouTube videos. Although, there is some
third-party widget software that allows the integration, it requires more technical expertise to
integrate the YouTube videos into pdf formatted books but is not particularly visually pleasing
© American Society for Engineering Education, 2016
