A Generalized Online Active Text (GOAT) for fluid mechanics instruction

Over the last two decades, the role of textbooks in engineering education has changed greatly. Publishers have slowly begun to adopt e-books that range from static PDFs to fully active learning tools. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way faculty deliver material and how students expect material to be available. Even prior to the pandemic, students began to rely heavily on un-curated videos available on online. Given the complexity of the subject and importance of visualization, fluid mechanics is an obvious candidate for a course that benefits from multimedia and active learning. For example, the historical MIT videos have been a staple in fluid mechanics courses for years and have slowly transitioned from tape, to CDs, to DVDs, and are now embedded in online e-books along with videos from other excellent sources such as Cambridge Core’s Multimedia Fluid Mechanics Online. Here, we present a new alternative that makes use of Cocalc’s version of Jupyter Notebooks to actively deliver fluid mechanics material. In particular, this Generalized Online Active Text (GOAT) includes integrated Embedded Mini-Lectures (EML) as well as Python coding examples and exercises, which integrate computational tools into the curriculum (something that has been encouraged by accreditation organizations).