Affiliations: Information Systems Engineering Laboratory, Faculty of
Science & Technology, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan
Abstract: In collaborative engineering, different engineers or organizations
collaborate to achieve the goal of planning and accomplishing an engineering
task. Collaborative engineering covers not only the technical aspects of
building a product, but also management issues, such as planning, scheduling,
and budgeting. It is essential for the collaborators to come together
periodically in the form of a conference to discuss urgent matters and to make
decisions. However, collaborators are often spread over vast geographical
distances making these attempts of holding a conference difficult, if not
altogether impossible. In this paper, we present "Computer-Mediated
Collaborative Engineering System" (CMCES) that we have designed to conduct
online collaborative engineering meetings, and to aid the various phases of
collaboration engineering. The purpose of CMCES is twofold – to hold an
online collaborative engineering meeting and to support the various stages in
collaborative engineering that is done in a distributed environment. CMCES is
chiefly used in synchronous mode, but it can be used asynchronously as well.
There are commercially available video conferencing systems, but CMCES is
designed to support distance collaborative engineering stages from the planning
to product-making, viz., planning, designing, scheduling and prototyping. CMCES
also stands for Computer-Mediated Collaborative Educational System. The same
features that are used for distance collaborative engineering can be used for
distance education. Real in-depth learning takes place in a collaborative
setting, where the students take the lead in teaching one another in the
presence of the instructor rather than being in a position of receiving
passively from the instructor. The salient features of CMCES support the
teacher-students interaction, students-teacher interaction and
students-students interaction that comprise a sound collaborative pedagogy.
CMCES is a low-cost and user-friendly online system with whiteboard, text,
audio and video functions. It is built by using Visual Basic and Direct X.
Direct X can be downloaded free of charge from Microsoft and can be run in the
Windows environment. CMCES can be easily executed on Windows platform.
