W E L C O M E !

Background

The NEEDS Project

NEEDS — The National Engineering Education Delivery System (see www.needs.org) — is the distributed architecture developed by Synthesis: A National Engineering Education Coalition (see best.me.berkeley.edu/~aagogino/synthesis/Publications.html) to enable new pedagogical models based on Internet-mediated learning environments. The emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW) in the early 1990's as a viable means for national and international sharing and re-use of education materials fundamentally changed our view of the way education and learning can be delivered. Internet-mediated learning environments provide mechanisms for the learner to be anyone, anywhere, at anytime. NEEDS has expanded its scope and currently catalogs courseware and other instructional software developed nationally and internationally to provide a resource where both instructors and learners can search, access, and download educational materials over the World Wide Web. In addition, NEEDS supports a multi-tier courseware evaluation system including a national award competition — the Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware.

NEEDS' vision of what a digital library for undergraduate engineering education should be is more than just a traditional academic library in digital form. The digital library of the future will be a community of learners — encompassing faculty, students, and life-long learners. With our current system, NEEDS has taken the first steps to developing this "new" digital library; we are driven by recent advances in research on education and student learning. We distinguish ourselves from commercial, Web-based search engines by providing focused, value-added services to our community. NEEDS is in the process of supplementing our current services by adding features such as user reviews and attachments, user registration, and discussion tools.

Brief History

Synthesis: A National Engineering Education Coalition, with funding from the National Science Foundation and industrial partners, was established in 1989 to reform undergraduate engineering education. This broad, nationally distributed coalition of eight diverse universities (including California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo; Cornell University; Hampton University; Iowa State University; Southern University; Stanford University; Tuskegee University; and the University of California, Berkeley) embraced instructional technologies as a means of assisting our curricular goals in the reform of undergraduate engineering education. Courseware, whether it is stand-alone and CD-ROM based, or networked and accessible over the Internet, provides methods to enhance the traditional learning process and address multiple learning styles. Key in the early stages of the Coalition was a vision to enable the sharing and reuse of materials developed within the Coalition.

Synthesis developed NEEDS as the mechanism to support the development, use and more importantly re-use of these instructional technologies. The nationally distributed nature of the Coalition and our interest in cross/multi-disciplinary education proved to be extremely important. Our experiences in dealing with a wide variety of institutions, technologies, and disciplinary and multidisciplinary content provided us with a broad view of how a national resource can be used, who can be its target audience, what instructional technologies can be made available through this resource, and what's needed to describe them.

NEEDS Infrastructure

NEEDS has developed a robust infrastructure built around a distributed server architecture. We maintain strong ties to the best of state-of-the art research in databases, information retrieval, and digital libraries. These ties to research coupled with a production focus have allowed us to evolve NEEDS in sync with the rapid changes occurring with information technologies in order to meet the needs of our users. From its debut in the early 1990's as a "text-based search engine over a centralized library catalog with pointers to digital course material" accessible via telnet to its transition to the Web in 1994 to the current system of 1999, NEEDS has undergone three major updates in response to users' needs collected through surveys of faculty and students in engineering education. NEEDS is ultimately about providing a service to our user community; we apply the appropriate technology to meet our users' needs. Along the way, we have developed and implemented key elements in a reliable, distributed, scalable system architecture, including: redundant Web servers; an integrated database with WWW-based searching and downloading, utilizing state-of-the-art database and information technologies; and an indirection system to support multiple, nationally-distributed archive servers for courseware download.

NEEDS continues to grow, evolve and contribute to international standards for data description and interoperability. NEEDS adheres to the standards developed by the Core Integration team of the NSDL (National STEM education Digital Library). We expose normalized Dublin Core metadata through our OAI-PMH (Open Archive Initiative-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) server for harvesting by the NSDL Core Integration (CI) initiative. In addition, we will offer a comprehensive and publicly accessible SOAP/WSDL/UDDI web service.

(Excerpted from Muramatsu, B. and Agogino, A., "NEEDS — The National Engineering Education Delivery System: A Digital Library for Engineering Education," D-Lib Magazine, April 1999, Volume 5, Issue 4, ISSN 1082-9873.)