About This Website

Background

I have been an instructor in the Electronic Engineering Technology (ELEN) program at Okanagan College since 2006 and my teaching and learning philosophy has been formed by two major influences. The first is Tony Kuphaldt who is not only the author of much if not most of the content on this website (via the open education resource: Lessons in Electric Circuits) but is also a deep thinker about how students learn. The second is the flipped classroom strategy which requires students to learn the theory at home and then participate in mentor guided exercises while in the classroom. The combination of these two influences has ultimately led to this website.

I first discovered Tony Kuphaldt’s Lessons in Electric Circuits and associated problem sets in 2006 when I started teaching. They were an invaluable aid because their completeness and the CC-BY license they used. I have been a fan and a user of that resource ever since.

In 2012, I decided to try implementing a flipped classroom, where students would view video lectures for homework and then do activities related to the lecture content in the classroom. In order to do that, I needed the lecture videos, so I started making videos for the three classes I was teaching (digital electronics, introduction to electronic devices and circuits, and introduction to electronics for mechanical engineering students). For a while, I was creating, editing, and posting 9 videos a week plus creating in-class exercises for students to work on. After a few weeks, I gave up on the course for mechanical engineering students; I just couldn’t keep up the pace and those students were very reluctant to try this new class format. As you can imagine, the video quality was fairly low and editing was fairly minimal, but I did create a large set of videos in that first year. I created almost enough material to cover the entirety of the digital electronics and the electronic devices courses. Over the next few years, I created a few more videos to fill in the gaps, but didn’t come close to the pace of video creation of that first year.

This website is my attempt to combine the two resources that I have used for educating electronic engineering technology students for the last 15+ years into one place for use by everyone.

How to use this website

Use this website in whatever way works best for you. You may want to use the ebooks as your course textbook or as a supplement to your course textbook. You may want to just use the question sets to test your knowledge. If you learn better with videos than with reading, you may want to use the sections of curated videos to help you through the course. Or maybe you just came here for a very specific topic and that’s it. Whatever you are here for, I hope this site is useful for you.

If you have any questions, see below for contact details