Development of 8086 Microprocessor Course For Web
Development of 8086 Microprocessor Course For Web
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ABSTRACT
The rapid advancement in educational tools experienced over the recent decades has introduced
online teaching environments that can facilitate or help develop virtual universities. As more and
more students are obtaining free Internet access, we see instructors starting to provide class
information, events, lectures, labs, tutorials, etc. on-line. The King Fahd University of Petroleum
and Minerals (KFUPM) has embarked on an initiative to develop courses across all its
engineering departments for web-based learning. This paper outlines the development of Digital
Systems Engineering (8086 microprocessor) course as part of this initiative. This course is now
in its first year of implementation. Initially, it was used entirely as supporting or supplementary
material. Feedback taken from students indicated that the e-material enhanced their
understanding of the course.
1. Introduction
Digital Systems Engineering (EE 390) is a basic course on microprocessors at the
Electrical Engineering department of KFUPM that is offered each semester in the
academic year. Moreover it is a basic required course for any electrical engineering
program worldwide. In this course, students learn about the 8086 microprocessor, its
architecture and its instruction set in detail. This course also enables the students to write
comprehensive assembly language programs. It is a practical oriented course and is,
therefore, very helpful to students in their senior design projects.
This course provides junior and sophomore students in electrical engineering the
ability to design a complete microprocessor or microcontroller system. Practical
microprocessor systems are studied in the course to enable the student to follow an
application-based approach.
The objective of developing this course for online delivery is to provide an
interactive, convenient, and self-paced, e-learning tool for teaching the fundamentals of
this course which is to be delivered on the WebCT platform. The WebCT platform
provides essential Communication and Course Management tools required in effectively
teaching this course fully online. The material developed and delivered via WebCT can
also be used to supplement the classroom lectures and can also be utilized in a blended
mode of learning. Online quizzes together with assignments will provide a means of
assessing student learning and progress.
3. Course Development
The development of the e-course [2] went through several stages. The course
material was first prepared using Microsoft Office, MathType and Visio. The entire
course was then developed for e-learning using Macromedia Authorware [3][4][5] as an
authoring tool which allows the publishing of course lectures in HTML format for
delivery over the internet. The development of the material was carried out in the
following phases:
Phase I: Transfer of Course Material to Authorware
Phase II: Preparation of Speech Files
Phase III: Creation of Animations and Interactivities
Phase IV: Refinement of Lectures & Interactivity
Phase V: Publishing of Lectures for WebCT
The course material features interactive examples, graphics and animations with
supporting speech. An automatic Text-to-Speech software [6] tool was used to generate
the speech files. Each lecture has several practice problems to make the material
interactive and to test the student’s ability to grasp the material being presented in the
lecture. Efforts have been made to make the material interactive and to enrich it through
audio, graphics and animations.
It has also been found from student feedback that concepts that are difficult to
understand in a face-to-face class or which take longer for an instructor to explain in the
class are easily understood by way of interactive examples.
5. Interface
An effective use of multi-media rich e-learning material depends on an
appropriate interface design to enable trouble free and easy access to these features [2]
[8]. The interface design provides ease of navigation, a sense of human interaction, and
responsiveness to the needs of learners studying in an information rich, self directed
medium.
Each lecture has multimedia features and buttons for navigation (as seen in Figure 1)
through the material and a few special functions as mentioned below:
7. Course Implementation
After the completion of the course development, the online course was offered
initially as supplementary material. The objectives of offering the course as
supplementary material are to test the effectiveness of the online material and to get
feedback from students. A further objective is to enable faculty members teaching the
course to become more familiar with the elements of the online course [5] [9].
Following this supplementary phase, the course was offered in a blended mode to
allow parts of the course to be taught completely online. Based on feedback from the
students and instructors, the entire course may be taught completely online in future.
Other online developed courses at the EE department have also been provided as
supplementary material. All students enrolled in these courses have been given access to
the material hosted on WebCT as they are given free Internet accounts.
8. Conclusion
We believe that development of this course for e-learning (with all its multimedia
elements, animations and interactivity) has definitely benefited students in understanding
the architecture, programming and interfacing of microprocessors. For instance,
interactive examples and animations are used to demonstrate how an instruction is
fetched, decoded and executed by the microprocessor. They are also used to demonstrate
to students how the Arithmetic and Logic unit functions in a microprocessor and how the
components outside the microprocessor are interfaced, which is otherwise not possible to
show in a traditional classroom lecture.
9. References
[1] “The 8088 and 8086 Microprocessors Programming interfacing, software, hardware
and applications”, 3rd edition, Walter A. Triebel and Avtar Singh, Printice Hall, 2000.
[3] Using Authorware, Macromedia, Inc., 600 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94103,
First Edition, August 2001.
[4] S. Junaidu and J. Al-Ghamdi, “Developing an Online Data Structures Course Using
Authorware”, USDLA Journal, Vol. 16 No.10, October 2002
http://www.usdla.org/html/journal/OCT02_Issue/article07.html
[7] Oliver, R., Herrington, J. and Omari, A. (1996). Creating effective instructional
materials for the World Wide Web. [verified 3 May 2002]
http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw96/educn/oliver/index.htm
[8] Allison Brown, “Designing for learning: What are the essential features of an
effective online course?”, Australian Journal of Educational Technology 1997, 13(2),
115-126