Technology and Tools to Enhance Distributed Engineering Education

While the ongoing information technology (IT) revolution is providing us with tremendous educational opportunities, educators and IT researchers face numerous obstacles and pedagogical questions. The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) has a long history in engineering education research and has developed and designed many different tools for instructor authoring, course capturing, indexing, and retrieval. Special attention has been applied to the design and deployment of distributed learning environments. This paper describes the environment and challenges facing Georgia Tech as it expands its campus worldwide while maintaining integration of faculty and students across these campuses. The focus is primarily on the problems of synchronous delivery to multiple sites with a description of how technology is currently being deployed in Georgia Tech's distance-learning (DL) classrooms, as well as technology that is under development for the DL classroom of the future.