Online-based teaching can facilitate skills development for today's global manufacturing environment

This output explored the impact of digital internet-based technologies on design student education in the manufacturing industry. The output demonstrates Bohemia’s ongoing interest in the relationships between design education, pedagogy, digital technologies and contemporary industrial practices. In 2003/4, Bohemia was awarded Aus$25,000, to support the development of on-line learning. He worked with academic staff from the University of Western Sydney and the University of Technology, Sydney, to develop an on-line design module. The module has been used as an exemplar by staff from the Educational Development Centre at the University of Western Sydney, to demonstrate ‘active collaborative online learning’ within University learning and teaching. The Innovations 2004 Board of Editors commented that: ‘Online delivery can be used to improve distance communication and virtual teamwork skills of students’, as demonstrated by Bohemia’. Additional outputs of this research area have been disseminated at a number of international conferences: Bohemia, E. & Clune, S., ‘Scheduling assessment tasks to foster deeper learning’, Sixth International Symposium on Tools and Methods of Competitive Engineering, TMCE 2006, Slovenia, April 2006. Power, C., Bohemia, E., Farrell, H. & Yevenes, K., ‘Collaborative curriculum design fosters graduates' communication skills, International Conference on Engineering Design - ICED 05, Australia, August 2005. Bohemia, E, & Thomson, R., ‘Cooperative Learning at a distance, for Design Students’, 8th International Design Conference - Design 2004, Croatia, May 2004. Bohemia, E., ‘Development of distance communication and virtual teamwork skills through online-based teaching’, International Conference on Engineering Education, Spain, July 2003 Bohemia, E. & Harman, K., ’Comparative study of on-line and face-to-face subject delivery in Industrial Design’, Exploring Emerging Design Paradigm – ICSID Educational Seminar 2001, Korea, October 2001.