EDESIGN

Abstract

Engineering design education involves certain characteristics that are beyond the scope of current content-based eLearning solutions, namely contextual social and collaborative interaction and iterative experimentation. An eLearning solution for design pedagogy must therefore bridge the gap between the physical and virtual worlds with a comprehensive framework based on modular components, which provides students with remote access to software and hardware resources, and establishes a virtual collaborative community. This paper discusses the architecture of the eDesign portal that integrates the traditional courseware technology with remotely-accessible hardware-in-the-loop simulation, eCollaboration tools, and virtual classroom and learning community.