Course Modeling for Student Profile Based Flexible Higher Education on the Internet

Higher education courses are increasingly created as student organized collections of interrelated modules. At the same time, frequent change of subject matter and knowledge in its background must be handled. Above and other factors created and recognized a need for efficient computer based course management. Conventional computer aided teaching methods are not suitable to organize, manage, and communicate the comprehensive course information any more. The authors considered an analogy with wellorganized computer descriptions of interrelated objects in the form of comprehensive integrated models in product engineering. Modeling and management of information serve engineering activities during lifecycle of product. Relevant advanced characteristics of integrated product descriptions are process orientation, definition of application oriented building elements called as features, and assistance of decisions by knowledge representations. The authors considered higher education course as one kind of product and proposed a course model. They focused to integrating student, teacher, and institute demand driven characteristics of modeling. Model is developed for application by course procedures. While conventional virtual education systems concentrate to computer mediated distance education, the authors considered arbitrary mix of campus and distance styles of education. In this paper, the authors first give an introduction in their approach to classroom modeling by a comparison of conventional distance education, conventional virtual classroom, and the proposed model based virtual classroom. Next, functional elements of the proposed course modeling and components of virtual classroom are explained. Conflicts as consequences of inappropriate capability or breaking of human intent are analyzed. Following this, initial conditions for definition of course module and construction of course module using modification by features are detailed. Finally, future work for implementation of the modeling in an experimental system composed by professional product lifecycle management (PLM) system, configurable virtual teaching environment, its virtual classroom extension and virtual classroom extension to the engineering modeling system is concluded.