e-book on Engineering Fracture Mechanics
 
This e-book is innovative in many ways. In this, a novel attempt is made to mimic the class room environment of developing the concepts through a series of careful steps. Text and animations are juxtaposed on a single screen for convenient learning. The textual matter is in the form of points and in many cases it synchronizes with the diagram or animation. This form of presentation is hoped to provide a semblance of class room teaching while viewing it on one s PC. Voice is intentionally not recorded, so that any one can provide additional explanations based on the material provided. The mathematical derivations are developed such that the slides pause at predefined steps allowing the learner to think and answer or help the teacher to make the class participate while using the e-book for teaching.
 
Although several text books are available on fracture mechanics, this is the first e-book on fracture mechanics. It has come about from teaching the course to graduate and under- graduate students for the last 15 years at IIT Kanpur and at IIT Madras. At Kanpur the course was taught conventionally using chalk and board but at IIT Madras the course has transformed into a multimedia course with critical inputs from at least five batches of students. The student response has greatly influenced the development of the course in many ways. While using the e-book, the user has to participate in the learning process. It is suggested that the learner sits with a pen and paper and view the e-book on his/her PC to learn the course.
 
The e-book has fourteen chapters. In each chapter, the contents page has an animation which indicates the learning goals for that chapter. To completely cover the slides provided, one would require a minimum of sixty hours. Depending on the nature of the class/teacher one can choose selected topics, so that a one semester (42 lectures) first level course on Fracture mechanics could be delivered.
 
System requirements: Pentium 4 processor, 128 MB RAM, Windows Operating System (2000, XP), Internet Explorer 5+ with Flash Plugin Support