Building E-education platform for design-oriented learning

Abstract

Design-oriented learning requires tools that support creative processes and student-to-student and student-to-faculty interactions. While most present E-Education systems perform as the asynchronous distribution channel for teaching material, they usually offer little support for project based design processes. This research maps out the key learning events in design classes at MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering, and proposes guidelines for building E-Education systems to support the unique characteristics of design-oriented learning. Two creative learning processes are identified and two independent, yet tightly related, software systems are implemented and evaluated. The first application, the Peer Review and Engineering Process (PREP), is a web system that helps instructors and students conduct and manage peer review evaluation of design concepts. The second is a real time application called InkBoard that leverages the Tablet PC and Ink medium to provide real-time collaborative sketching over TCP/IP networks. A new streaming network protocol for transferring Ink objects is proposed and implemented. A comparative study against other ink-enabled protocols is also presented.