Fostering Collaborative Learning and Mass-Customization of Education in a Graduate Engineering Design Course*

The rapid progress of globalization has lead to many unprecedented changes in the world in which our students will practice. New product development paradigms such as mass collaboration are redefining the way in which products are realized. The authors believe that in the light of these changes, new approaches to educating the next generation of engineers are needed. Towards this goal, the authors present a pedagogical approach to allow students to experience mass collabora-tion and to improve their understanding of emerging trends in product development. The approach is designed to foster collective learning and to apply mass customization in education. It is presented in the context of a graduate engineering design course—‘Designing Open Engineering Systems’. Two of the main features of the approach are: (1) providing the students with the opportunity to define their own learning goals, and (2) posing a broad question to which the students are required to develop an answer by the end of the semester. All activities of the course are geared towards answering this question—both individually and collectively. Collective learning is facilitated through semester-long continuous development of a collaborative answer to the Q4S by the entire class. Mass customization of education is achieved by having students define their personal semester goals as well as personalizing their answer to the Q4S. A web-based collaborative learning framework is developed for this course using social networking tools to facilitate communication, and to simulate a mass collaborative environment. The authors believe that such pedagogical approaches are essential for developing a foundation for next generation educational environments