Competitive Design of Web-Based Courses in Engineering Education - Web-Based Engineering Education: Critical Design and Effective Tools - page 128

mEtHodoLogy environment is reflected in the interaction be-

tween the life-cycles of four sub-systems that
describe the educational product-market needs
and requirements, teaching-learning process,
study program and educational provider. The
four life-cycles must be well-balanced in order
to create favourable premises for the provision
of successful web-based courses in engineering
(Popescu, Brad & Popescu, 2006). Evolution of
the educational environment is reflected in the
evolutions of the four sub-systems mentioned
before as a consequence of various attractors.
Attractors have to be seen as aggregated effects
of some external influence factors acting with a
relevant intensity upon these sub-systems, thus
generating bifurcation points in their evolutions.
For example, technological progress in the area
of remote communication tools will influence the
evolution of the teaching-learning process; as well,
various transformations in the social and economic
environments will influence the evolution of the
educational provider models, etc.
Even if several new tools and paradigms have
been developed and tested in the attempt of adapt-
ing the training in engineering to nowadays' needs,
there are still many unknowns on how to develop
a web-based course as a whole, not only limited
to the teaching and learning methods. Almost any
topic in engineering has particular characteristics,
which implicitly requires a deep customization
of a web-based course. Thus, a collection of
complex problems must be crossed over to set
up mature web-based courses in engineering. In
conclusion, a web-based course in engineering
must be “designed for customization” as any other
kind of tailor-made product or service in order to
achieve high quality levels (Brad, 2008). But such
approaches require radical innovation and use of
adequate planning tools during the conceptualiza-
tion process of the web-based course. The next
section of this chapter is going to propose such
methodology.

The methodology for systematic planning and
innovation of a competitive web-based course in
engineering integrates in a novel way QFD-based
planning matrices with TRIZ inventive vectors in
order to display and rank priorities of intervention
and to formulate innovative solutions to various
challenges. The methodology consists of several
steps that are further revealed.

Step 1

The methodology starts with definition of business
objectives in relation to the web-based course.
Here, they are denoted with BO 1 , BO 2 , …, BO m ,
where m is the number of business objectives. In
order to lead the planning process under various
constrains (e.g. time, budget, technology, etc.),
business objectives have to be ranked. The AHP
method is proposed for performing this task.
At the end of this process the following set of
ranked business objectives is obtained: BO ( R ( t ))
= { BO 1 ( R 1 ( t )), BO 2 ( R 2 ( t )), …, BO m ( R m ( t ))}, where
R i ( t ), i = 1, …, m , is the estimated degree of im-
portance of the business objective BO i , i = 1, …,
m , at the moment in time t when the course is
delivered. Working with estimates instead of static
values underlines the inconsistency of informa-
tion between the moment of web-based course
planning, conceptualization and development and
the moment when the course is commercialized;
thus showing the dynamic and evolutionary nature
of the educational program. In other words, the
importance given now to the business objectives
might be different after N months (time t ) when the
course is delivered. Thus, because of the evolving
educational environment, ranks at moment t can
be only estimated, the accuracy of the estimates
depending on the level of understanding the evolu-
tion and interaction of the influential factors of the
educational environment. This philosophy is also
transferred to the next steps of the methodology.