Infrastructure supporting collaborative project based learning in engineering education

The paper presents a web-based virtual environment aimed to promote project based collaborative learning and continuous work around shared objects. It is designed to provide specific affordances for joint development of shared objects, organizing related tasks aswell as user networks and interactions. The environment provides a coherent set of tools in order to initiate and manage collaborative processes, to create, work on and share documents collectively, and to support synchronous and asynchronous communication among participants. A co-design framework, basic features, architecture, as well as supporting tools and their implementation are considered. The results of current field trials with the tools are also briefly outlined.

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