Using XML/Java to enhance an online learning architecture for engineering education

This paper will present the architecture for designing and developing a web-based teaching enhancement tool for engineering education. This architecture will enhance student learning by providing an innovative way for them to interact with standard engineering software through the web. The new architecture will provide a flexible online learning environment that will allow the students to present, test and evaluate their own ideas. To demonstrate its capabilities, we will present a Java application platform using this architecture. Moreover, we shall briefly discuss an XML-based markup language, Control Block Diagram Markup Language (CBDML), that was written during the development of this application. The design of the architecture described in this article has many possible applications, but this paper only presents the core results; more applications could enrich the architecture and CBDML, thus making possible a wide variety of production ideas