Preparing engineers for a future with collaborative technology

To educate our engineering students and other professionals, we developed and taught a course on collaborative multidisciplinary analysis and design (MAD) technology in the spring semester, 1997 at Syracuse University. The objective is to teach students how to use different MAD tools in the product realization process. The course materials cover interdisciplinary subjects related to engineering, information technology, networking, artificial intelligence (AI), and World Wide Web (WWW)-based tools. In specific, it includes collaborative design and product development, multiuser architectures, information sharing and virtual teaming, negotiation and transaction management, and networking technology to deliver information services in a virtual computing environment, and other Al and WWW-based MAD tools. The course involves a variety of teaching/learning activities including regular classroom lectures, software demos, and hands-on workshop sessions. A semesterlong project on collaborative technology is required for each student. Students are evaluated based on their class participation and the course project. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.