E-learning Platform for Innovative Product Development Erasmus Project

Project Title

E-learning Platform for Innovative Product Development

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Research and innovation; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

The underlying idea of this project was to enhance the existing e-learning infrastructure used within project-based learning courses and develop a methodology for its customisation and implementation to other courses. E-learning, as an approach, has a significant role in obtaining and acquiring digital skills due to its scalability and the possibility to update available content. Furthermore, through enriched e-learning experiences during their higher education, students got used to navigating digital content, engaging in online/virtual tasks, and generally becoming more comfortable with digital tools. Proposed e-learning infrastructure embraces existing Web and other ICT technologies that facilitate technical and non-technical knowledge and information exchange and foster creativity and problem-solving in virtual project-based learning courses.

Four HEIs participated in the project: University of Zagreb, Croatia, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, Politecnico di Milano, Italy and TU Wien, Austria. The fifth partner was University Computing Centre (SRCE) from Zagreb.

The focus of the research and development activities in the project was on establishing e-learning platforms to adapt to the demanding needs of project-based design courses. New concepts and structure of the e-learning platform were established, implemented, and validated simultaneously with three consecutive years of student project-based learning courses, conducted in close cooperation with selected industrial partners. This way, a real industrial environment was simulated in order to thoroughly test, improve and demonstrate the intellectual outputs of this project.

Four main intellectual outputs were proposed:
– Proof-of-concept of the e-learning platform for virtual project-based design course (O1). This includes a definition of e-learning platform architecture and content type. As a part of activities related to this output, different problem-solving, creativity, CAD/CAE, and visualisation tools were tried out to check their suitability for virtual project-based learning courses.
– Completed e-learning platform for virtual project-based design course (O2). The completed e-learning platform merges the general functionalities of online collaboration tools with problem-solving, creativity, CAD/CAE, and visualisation tools, which are needed for flawless project work in a virtual environment.
– Methodology for customising and implementing e-learning platforms within project-based design courses (O3).
– The virtual PBL course structure and organisation of the virtual workshop (O4). The obtained knowledge on e-learning systems and virtual tools allowed us to conduct the complete PBL course in an online environment seamlessly (advancement to previous course editions).

A sequence of three consecutive summer semester courses at participating HEIs was used to conduct case studies and validate intellectual outputs. In addition, work done by students with the e-learning platform throughout the courses was presented on the final workshop events at the end of blended short-term mobility of the students.

This project introduced students to the state-of-the-art digital technologies used in a virtual engineering environment, preparing them for the future working environment. The accompanying research studies resulted in invaluable insights for educational researchers.

Project-based design courses are quite common on European and international universities, and the project outputs comprise guidelines on how to tailor e-learning platforms and how to provide students better digital support during PBL work. Therefore, the proposed platform can motivate educators on other academic institutions to further develop this key aspect of their design courses. As such, these courses would better reflect today’s engineering practice and attract more students because of their immediate applicability and hands-on experience (quite often neglected in traditional design courses).
Since there is a continuous tendency to integrate more digital tools into engineering education, the outputs of this project could have a significant impact on different design project courses and the improvement of existing e-learning support for project-based learning in general. Building on these premises, we expect that project outputs could be adopted and used in other areas and sectors besides engineering design.

Project Website

http://www.elpid.org/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 243134,36 Eur

Project Coordinator

SVEUCILISTE U ZAGREBU, FAKULTET STROJARSTVA I BRODOGRADNJE & Country: HR

Project Partners

• POLITECNICO DI MILANO
• SVEUCILISTE U ZAGREBU SVEUCILISNI RACUNSKI CENTAR
• UNIVERZA V LJUBLJANI
• TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAET WIEN