Competitive Design of Web-Based Courses in Engineering Education - Web-Based Engineering Education: Critical Design and Effective Tools - page 145

lenging ones are “design for web-based course
content quality” and “design for fast web-based
course customization.” Both design for course
content quality and course customization lead to
a significant number of conflicting problems. As
a consequence, adequate planning and innovation
is required to overpass crisis points in web-based
course system conceptualization, development
and implementation.
Performance planning could be further
deployed to the level of teaching and learning
processes, as well as to the pedagogical meth-
ods. Here, there is a huge space of action, where
competitive design methods and methodologies
would be extremely useful to handle less tangible
dimensions and incomplete data.
Development of more realistic and intuitive
simulation tools for web-based courses should
be another area where competitive design would
play an important role. Actually, this is a gener-
ous area for future developments, because every
producing organization will have to become
conscious that provision to universities of simula-
tion tools related to their products will represent
a competitive weapon. These tools will have to
operate effectively via internet. In this respect,
future developments of web technologies will sup-
port this process. Moreover, new organizational
models of the educational providers will have to
be considered.
Universities will have to enhance their part-
nerships with producing organizations, acting as
“extended open universities.” In this area, com-
petitive design will provide a reliable framework
to ensure a superior balance between effort and
effect in web-based course conceptualization,
development and delivery.
Further challenges in web-based course de-
velopment will occur. They will be related to the
development of a new generation of web-based
courses in engineering. Such courses will consider
remote interactions with hardware systems, also
including capabilities for “sensing” the remote
environment. In this area, competitive design will

play an important role for setting up ingenious and
commercial sustainable solutions, too.

concLuSIon

The consideration of competitive design philoso-
phy for setting up successful web-based courses
in engineering is introduced in this material. Web-
based courses in engineering are complex systems,
which have to face with various challenges from
technical, technological, financial and organi-
zational points of view. From this perspective,
such courses have to be designed and developed
in strong connection with the context where they
are going to be implemented, thus no “best-of-the-
world” solution exists, and only context-related
optimal solutions could be proposed at the best.
Therefore, application of performance planning
and innovative problem solving tools is neces-
sary during the conceptualization and design of
such courses.
This chapter introduces a novel framework
for concurrent planning of a web-based course
considering its multiple facets. The planning pro-
cess starts from the incipient phases of web-based
course development. The goal is to formulate a
competitive solution in an effective and efficient
way, with lower development costs and in a reason-
able period of time. Several concluding remarks
derive from the application of methodology on
the case study.
First, designing a successful web-based course
in engineering requires simultaneous consider-
ation of multiple sides characterizing the respec-
tive course. Second, the complex nature of the
course necessitates an innovative approach of
solution formulation in order to overpass inevitable
conflicting problems of technical, technologi-
cal, organizational and financial nature. Third, a
web-based course in engineering should be seen
as a dynamic system, whose evolution in time is
strongly dependent by the correlations between
the life-cycles of its major sub-systems (e.g. com-