RESEARCH _____________________________________________________________________________

Engineering Education:

The mission of an educator is to provide the highest quality educational experience to the learner that is feasible under a set of constraints.  These constraints are especially binding in highly specialized courses, usually offered at the graduate level, where the availability of supporting materials such as textbooks and educational aids may be very limited.  Therefore, it is common to find educators in graduate courses working in isolation toward the development of better educational experiences for the learners.  This is a sub-optimal solution as scarce resources are used at different institutions to develop educational experiences in the very same areas of knowledge instead of coordinating efforts to allocate resources to different areas and share the results. These collaborative efforts are difficult to implement because of logistical, technological, and time constraints.  What is needed are technological platforms to encourage this type of collaboration by providing clear advantages to those employing them. 

An example of a project in this area is the Virtual Coach.  This research project provides a visualization-based decision-making environment for the execution of situational simulations. For background information on this project visit the publications section.