Two perspectives on a cross-university Collaborative Engineering Design course

Society today expects that products and processes be designed more rapidly, and with a higher quality, than ever before. Many organizations achieve this by employing collaborative design teams consisting of members that may be either co-located or globally dispersed. Unfortunately, collaborations do not always succeed, many times due to a lack of knowledge as to how to collaborate effectively. Several years ago, Syracuse and Cornell Universities established a two semester Collaborative Engineering Design course to teach students the tools and techniques of collaborative design. In the course, students from both universities work together to design various systems for future aerospace vehicles. Students are supported in their design activities through both collaborative-design-related instruction and a computer-based infrastructure, called the Advanced Interactive Discovery Environment (AIDE), which provides both synchronous and asynchronous communications. Many lessons have been learned through observations, as well as extensive surveys; these lessons are described herein from both the student's and faculty member's perspectives.