Building A Digital Learning Community For Faculty On The Internet

The exponential growth of the Internet and World Wide Web have led to increased competition in the quality of Internet services provided. Increasingly sophisticated users are no longer satisfied with dealing with static sets of information alone and expect a broad array of new services and features on Web sites. In particular, they are expecting more interactivity and want services that help them to connect with other people to exchange and discuss information they find. Engineering faculty are no exception to this trend — the Internet provides them with an opportunity to connect with colleagues and establish professional relationships based on issues around teaching and learning. NEEDS (the National Engineering Education Delivery System), a digital library for engineering education (www.needs.org) is the distributed architecture developed by Synthesis: A National Engineering Education Coalition (see www.synthesis.org) to enable the sharing of new pedagogical models based on Internet-mediated learning environments. NEEDS has undertaken an effort to learn more about its users and has found that with regards to teaching, faculty prefer to learn from one another. As a result of this research, NEEDS is experimenting with a variety of on-line services that can develop and support emerging communities among the faculty who are interested in interacting with one another in order to better use instructional technology and new pedogogies in their classrooms. In this paper, we discuss research on the potential impact of Web-based learning communities for faculty who are interested in engineering education. This research has been used in the design of the architecture necessary for NEEDS to provide and support this service.

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