Digital Design House – A Cloud Online E-learning Platform for Collaborative Product Development

Abstract

The recent social events and COVID-19 pandemic have posed huge challenges to teaching and learning. The teaching team seized these challenges as opportunities to further develop and incorporate e-learning in experiential projects and capstone courses, which otherwise mandate intensive face-to-face interactions. The team has recently developed the Digital Design House – A cloud online e-learning platform for collaborative product development – to facilitate experiential learning and hands-on projects in some capstone and experiential courses that carry substantial components of innovative product design and development. The Digital Design House is a cloud-based experiential elearning platform that provides remote access to CAD facilities for students to interact among group members and with teachers in virtual environments to share their ideas for product design and development. This online e-learning platform integrates a set of advanced information and computing, 3D Hologram isplays/devices, virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR) and mobile devices with a suite of in-house developed applications for stereoscopic visualisation of virtual objects in an immersive virtual environment to facilitate systematic training and development of students' innovative abilities through experiential learning. It not only allows students and teachers at different geographical regions to ubiquitously conduct teaching and learning, but also facilitates online lectures via video conferencing like Zoom or Microsoft Teams with more interactions in a virtually face-to-face environment. Indeed, this platform helps students understand what and how various knowledge and feasible technologies can be effectively integrated to create a feasible design/solution in a practical and innovative approach. As such, students are inspired with a stronger desire, self-initiative and enthusiasm for exploring their potential in innovative creations.