On the use of advanced IT tools to facilitate effective, geographically distributed student design teams

To provide a formal mechanism to learn about, and teach students bout, tools and techniques for harnessing the benefits of distance collaborations, Syracuse and Cornell Universities are collaboratively teaching a senior-level engineering design course. Communication in the course include lectures by distance learning classrooms, asynchronous communications through a web-based collaboration environment and off-hours meetings between students and faculty. To help the student design teams communicate, a web-based collaboration environment called the Advanced Interactive Discovery Environment (AIDE) is developed. All aspects of the cossurse and the IT use are monitored to extract research findings on the design and use the tools for distance collaboration.