Application Study Of Virtual Experiment Teaching In Modern Distance Education

With the rapid development of computer technology and information technology, launching the modern distance education furthers a great-leap-forward development of China education and a construction of long-life education system and long-life learning society. During the course of practicing deeply in distance education, researchers are paying more attention on how to establish a virtual experiment environment for long-distance learners to provide interactive experiments. In fact, it is difficult that the teaching model of traditional experiments satisfies the requirement of distance learners, majorities of whom are on the job, due to the limitation of economy and experiment condition, time and space of their doing experiments. Virtual experiment based on network technology and virtual reality technology is computer simulation experiments with rich multimedia information, which not only provides experiment resource and effective learning environment to raise learners' enthusiasm and initiative; but enhances the combination with theoretical teaching and instructional effects in distance education.Virtual experiment establishes a quite realistic experiment environment, where learners can experience personally and interact with three-dimensional object to finish experiments. With application to distance education, virtual experiment annotates a brand-new instructional model, strongly supports distance education on the field of science and engineering, expands the scope of distance education and perfects its function.Virtual experiment is a core of virtual experiment system. In this article, take distance education in tertiary education for example firstly, after showing the present condition of the development of distance education and the application of experiments, at the same time, the necessity and feasibility of the application of virtual experiment to distance education are discussed, too. With that, the connotations, characteristics and classifications about virtual experiment are present in detail, the theoretical foundation and feature are introduced and instructional strategies of virtual experiment and its design model are analyzed. Secondly, the article designs the model of virtual experiments system and puts a stress on the introduction of VRML(Virtual Reality Modeling Language); and then gives a concrete example of metal stretching experiment based instructional theory of virtual experiment in Material Mechanics, which builds a three-dimensional experiment scene, relying on the combination VRML and 3DSMax, emulates the course of stretching the test sample via the interactive technology, implements the interactive control between VRML scene and outer world via EAI(External Authoring Interface), and integrates experiment scene and web page via HTML. At last, both summary of our research and analysis of future study direction of virtual experiment in the thesis are given.