The Control Engineering Exercises Journal – IT infrastructure costs for the startup period

The project team is currently testing a mechanism that shall (ideally) promote sharing open access control education resources. The mechanism enables teachers to submit their most interesting conceptual exercises (with their solutions) for peer review in a dedicated journal, for now informally called "Control Engineering Exercises". This project will support the web hosting costs for the startup period of the journal.

Organizer:

Damiano Varagnolo, Department of Engineering Cybernetics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway

Sponsoring IFAC Body:

TC 9.4 - Control Education

Description:

We are currently testing a mechanism that shall (ideally) promote sharing open access control education resources. The mechanism enables teachers to submit their most interesting conceptual exercises (with their solutions) for peer review in a dedicated journal, for now informally called "Control Engineering Exercises". The material will then be published with a DOI, and be citable (i.e., an author may say, when submitting an own exercise, that it connects to some other specific ones, effectively thus citing them). This project will support the web hosting costs for the startup period of the journal.

Importantly, this journal shall not collect simple procedural exercises, but rather material that addresses misconceptions about key concepts in control engineering. We thus strive towards publishing high quality non-trivial questions and exercises that prove themselves effective didactically for teaching such key concepts. Moreover, to promote reusability, it shall implement an effective search engine, enabling advanced queries (e.g., "find a conceptual question about this topic, but for persons that did not study that other topic", or similar advanced searches).

This new journal shall eventually become:

  • a source of inspiration and assessment material for who teaches concepts connected to automatic control;
  • a mechanism for sharing the own efforts in producing high quality assessment material with the community;
  • a learning resource for students.

We also believe that if this publishing mechanism will prove effective in promoting sharing resources for the control community, it may then be extended to other fields.