Engineering Economics Textbook Replacement Teaching Materials
Bibliographic record
Abstract
All engineering students in Canada must take an Engineering Economics course as part of program accreditation requirements. These courses mainly focus on the evaluation of monetary profits and direct financial costs incurred during the design, operation and decommissioning phases of projects. Instructors commonly use textbooks as the primary tool to guide the students through the content of this course, which tend cost around $100 each student. Like many courses, the materials in this course does not change much over time resulting in many students opting to not buy the required textbook and instead rely on free sources of information found online, in older editions of textbooks or simply rely on course notes. The patchwork of sources creates problems in this course in particular, because of the variation of notation used across sources, which can easily cause confusion. It was this problem that inspired the creation of a set of open-source materials that students and instructors can use for free, enabling the instructor to have control over notation and concepts to focus on while saving the students money. As such, these materials were created with the support of the Open Educational Resource Fund through an OER Implementaion Grant. A faculty member led the creation of the materials with the help of a team of undergraduate engineering and commerce students (all named as authors). The early planning stages of the project included rethinking the traditional textbook format, and opting instead to produce annotated and comprehensive slides designed to function as both study aids for students and instructional tools for educators. The foundational concepts of engineering economics were systematically organized into twelve distinct chapters, each represented by a PowerPoint slide deck. Each deck includes a title page and a table of contents slide (for organizational purposes), with the remaining slides relatively content heavy. While prioritizing accessibility through readable formatting (able to be read by software for those who are visually impaired), minimal emphasis was placed on a particular presentation style. This straightforward format intentionally allows instructors flexibility to tailor the material to their preferences. Instructors are afforded the latitude to infuse their distinctive approach, incorporating personal touches, stylistic elements, anecdotes, pertinent visuals, or discipline-specific case studies as deemed appropriate. The intent was to empower instructors with a malleable framework that accommodates diverse teaching styles and facilitates the integration of contextually relevant content. Additionally, a set of practice problems (including solutions), were created for every chapter for self-paced student engagement. The formulation of questions, encompassing both in-class examples and practice problems, adhered to a gender-neutral phrasing approach to ensure inclusivity. Additionally, all questions were designed to be discipline-neutral, accommodating diverse engineering departments and enhancing the materials' applicability for dissemination purposes. To ensure uniformity of notation across the slides and practice problems during development, a list of variables and a formula sheet were also created and included as integral components of the materials package. [An updated file of Chapter 4 with minor revisions was uploaded on 2024-07-10.] [OER Description: These course modules on engineering economics were developed to support undergraduate upper division courses. This open educational resource (OER) includes slideshow presentations and problem sets with solutions.]
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.404 | 0.210 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".