ABSTRACT:
In 2001, the School of Engineering and Industrial Design undertook an initiative to conduct a pilot study of the on line delivery of the ‘Design Management: Organisational Skills for Designers’ subject. This subject is one of the core subjects offered by the Industrial Design program to industrial design and engineering students. The subject has been developed to address industry needs identified in previous research. One of the key learning outcomes of the subject was for students to develop distance communication and virtual teamwork skills, which are becoming increasingly important in new product development as a result of changing global manufacturing environment. The on-line component of the subject was structured to stimulate students’ independent learning and to develop their critical thinking by arousing their curiosity in the topics by incorporating the seven processes of critical thinking and writing. Student evaluation data has been used to evaluate the effectiveness of the approaches introduced in this subject.
