Background

I have been an instructor in the Electronic Engineering Technology (ELEN) program at Okanagan College since 2006 and my teaching and learning philosophy has been formed by two major influences. The first is Tony Kuphaldt who is not only the author of much if not most of the content on this website (via the open education resource: Lessons in Electric Circuits) but is also a deep thinker about how students learn. The second is the flipped classroom strategy which requires students to learn the theory at home and then participate in mentor guided exercises while in the classroom. The combination of these two influences has ultimately led to this website.

I first discovered Tony Kuphaldt’s Lessons in Electric Circuits and associated problem sets in 2006 when I started teaching. They were an invaluable aid because their completeness and the CC-BY license they used. I have been a fan and a user of that resource ever since.

In 2012, I decided to try implementing a flipped classroom, where students would view video lectures for homework and then do activities related to the lecture content in the classroom. In order to do that, I needed the lecture videos, so I started making videos for the three classes I was teaching (digital electronics, introduction to electronic devices and circuits, and introduction to electronics for mechanical engineering students). For a while, I was creating, editing, and posting 9 videos a week plus creating in-class exercises for students to work on. After a few weeks, I gave up on the course for mechanical engineering students; I just couldn’t keep up the pace and those students were very reluctant to try this new class format. As you can imagine, the video quality was fairly low and editing was fairly minimal, but I did create a large set of videos in that first year. I created almost enough material to cover the entirety of the digital electronics and the electronic devices courses. Over the next few years, I created a few more videos to fill in the gaps, but didn’t come close to the pace of video creation of that first year.

This website is my attempt to combine the two resources that I have used for educating electronic engineering technology students for the last 15+ years into one place for use by everyone.

How to use this website

Use this website in whatever way works best for you. You may want to use the ebooks as your course textbook or as a supplement to your course textbook. You may want to just use the question sets to test your knowledge. If you learn better with videos than with reading, you may want to use the sections of curated videos to help you through the course. Or maybe you just came here for a very specific topic and that’s it. Whatever you are here for, I hope this site is useful for you.

If you have any questions, see below for contact details

DC Electrical Circuits

A DC, or direct current circuit is one in which current flows in one direction only. Generally, they consist of constant voltage and/or current source(s). Most of the focus will be on resistors and voltage sources, but other components covered are current sources, capacitors and inductors. This set of books, videos, practice problems, and experiments covers a basic first course in DC circuits.

AC Electrical Circuits

An AC, or alternating current circuit is one in which current alternates flowing in one direction and then the other. This set of books, videos, practice problems, and experiments covers a basic first course in AC circuits.

Digital Electronics

Digital electronics covers a wide range of topics starting with the building blocks of computer systems (logic gates) to the design of finite state machines. This book starts actually starts even earlier than logic gates and discusses different number systems and binary arithemetic as well

Electronic Circuits and Devices

Electronic circuits are electric circuits in which some means of control is exerted over the flow of electrons by another electrical signal. You might say that the electrons are herded. This set of books, videos, practice problems, and experiments covers a basic first course in electronic (semiconductor) devices and circuits.

Operational Amplifiers

Op amps have a diverse range of uses. In addition to learning about these uses, you’ll also learn about negative feedback, nonideal characteristics of operational amplifiers, how to design active filters, and data acquisition principles.

Communication Systems

A communication system is nothing more than a system that facilitates transfer of information from a source to a destination. In the real world, at the most fundamental level, there are literally countless numbers and types of communication systems..

Engineering is hard

If you have the perseverance to work through an engineering or engineering technology program, you deserve all the support you can get. I want you to succeed in your engineering courses and program and this website is here to support you.