Sustaining Collaboration within a Learning Community in Flexible Engineering Education

This paper presents an innovative approach in flexible learning that can facilitate hands-on activities in engineering education. The approach focuses on the mediation role of artifacts within a learning community. The artifacts serve both as a medium and as a product of the collaboration process in the community. We have proposed the eJournal as a mediating artifact, which has been developed to support knowledge acquisition and reinforcement in a collaborative way. The eJournal is designed as a shared workspace that supplies different metrics for sharing, monitoring and evaluating the collaborative learning process in flexible hands-on activities. The eJournal is integrated into the Cockpit environment, which is currently used for various practical courses at the School of Engineering, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL).