Teach and Learn with Technologies in a Mobile Campus for Engineers

Featured Speakers: Luc Mariaux and Jean-Pierre Berthet, L'Ecole Centrale de Lyon

Our objective is to prepare future engineers to work in a mobile and nomad environment. To achieve this goal, we have to give them similar conditions to those they will have to recommend and practice in industry. Since 2004, we are conducting a large scale experiment with 50 teachers and 1000 students (1/3 of our teachers and all our students) using tablet-pc in courses, lab-works and team projects with small group of students (4 to 6) and face to face teaching. The main results are: 1) Handwriting technology allows teachers and students to combine the advantages of blackboard and computers on the same device. 2) To maximize the impact in terms of number of students and teachers using this technology, one solution is to dedicate some tablet-pc to a specific use mainly during lab-work and team projects. Our new strategic initiative “Mobile Campus for nomad engineers” has three objectives: — Enhance pedagogical use of technology, with one mobile computer for each new student in September 2007, inside a full Wi-Fi covered campus; — Certify IT skills for engineers, as coordinator of a national certification program “IT-Skills for engineers” (target 100 000 students); — Share our experience and develop distance collaborative courses including annotation inside the network of the “Group des Ecoles Centrale” including 5 campus in France and one in Beijing-China with 6000 students coming from 85 worldwide universities.

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