Cooperative Distance - Education Paradigm for a Networked Application Course

Internet technologies recently have developed extremely fast. The development of WWW applications has increased the accessibility of the Internet. New information and communication technologies are developing and playing a growing role in engineering education. Based on these technologies and new teaching methodologies, this study designed a cooperative distance-education paradigm for engineering education. From the team teaching perspective, classroom teachers collaborate on distance teaching with other teacher-librarians simultaneously in different scenes. Each teacher in this teaching team can hear /present critical information to learners and other teachers. Three modules are designed in this paradigm, namely: web-oriented curriculum, SCORM-based e-book and Access Grid cooperative distance-education (see Fig. 1). In the web-oriented curriculum module, a curriculum website was designed and reposed on several teaching resources, including teaching materials, teaching programs, and experimental handouts (see Fig. 2). Teachers and students can obtain the teaching/learning guidelines from the website in advance. Implementing this module will produce an interface for web-based distance education that is innovative in terms of student characteristics and teaching/learning process evaluation. To provide ubiquitous learning environments, this paradigm included an e-book module based on the learning technology standards, SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model), which provides a standardized communication interface between the LMS (Learning Management System) and learning content (courseware) for tracking learner profile and supporting the reusability of learning objects. Based on the wireless communication and Bluetooth technologies, we also make teaching materials and resources accessible to mobile learners at anytime, anywhere. The cooperative distance-education module integrates distributed resources from different networks/sites into a shared platform where learners can easily fulfill cooperative learning (see Fig. 3). Access Grid technology provides interactive network services and supports multimedia applications via a high-speed backbone network. Because it