An In-Class Practice and Oral-Presentation as an Innovative Approach for Teaching Hydraulic Component Reliability Theory and Fault Diagnosis

Reliability engineering is increasingly essential for the industrial application to improve the reliability of products and equipment. For a course named Hydraulic Component Reliability Theory and Fault Diagnosis to third-year undergraduate students or engineers, beginners may have difficulties to comprehend concepts about reliability theory without much theoretical background in mathematics. This contradiction may decrease study initiative, and lead to failure of learning. To deal with this problem, an in-class practice and oral-presentation methodology was introduced to students in Wuhan University of Science and Technology, P.R. China. This proposed method was designed based on key points of this course to enhance the involvement of students. These designed in-class tasks were good exercises for students since these tasks were to be achieved step by step according to difficult degree in understanding. This paper presented initial case study results to verify the effectiveness of this proposed teaching method. Overall, assessment results from undergraduate students demonstrated the new method is valid for this course.