Introducing Aviation Technological College Students to Online Collaborative CAD Design

This paper argues for incorporating learning online collaborative design (LOCD) in technical colleges. It reports a case study of a LOCD workshop given to students majoring in aviation technology as part of the CAD course. In the implemented approach, the students, who already had basic CAD skills, were engaged in team projects in a setting where they performed the analysis tasks while sitting together, and performed the design assignment through online collaboration while sitting apart from each other and. The teams were divided into two groups: one used the desktop platform Solid Edge and the other the cloud-based platform Onshape. In the study, we identified several characteristics of learning online collaborative design and showed that the cloud-based platform was better suited to provide them. The students who used Onshape had less difficulty communicating with each other and managing their design projects. Our data analytics inquiry into the division of work and collaboration within Onshape teams indicated that during the design process, team members actively interacted with each other, alternating between the functions of executing design operations and monitoring their implementation. We call for further research towards the development of learning environments and instructional strategies for incorporating online collaborative design in college education.