EXPERIENCES WITH NAVIGATED ACTIVE LEARNING IN MULTI-NATIONAL ACADEMIC VIRTUAL ENTERPRISES

A series of engineering design courses, called global product realization, has been offered to university students of various countries in the last four years. Each course was organized with different partner companies and universities and with different pedagogical objectives. This paper summarizes the experiences considering organizational, professional, technological, pedagogical, and practical aspects. The organization of this type of courses needs much more efforts than of a regular course, but working in an academic virtual enterprise on real life problems with company experts and international partners opens up a new dimension of active learning for the students. Collaboration using a videoconferencing infrastructure develops the skills of the students for an effective operation in virtual enterprises.