Selecting an authoring program for undergraduate engineering computer-based instruction

The Greenfield Coalition for New Manufacturing Education is a National Science Foundation-supported partnership of six diverse educational institutions, five top manufacturing companies, an international member-based educational society, and an operational manufacturing/teaching enterprise. Greenfield is a new model for manufacturing education based on the combination of skill and deep engineering knowledge resulting from an integration of engineering practice and innovative pedagogy. The coalition is creating next-generation courseware designed to integrate training issues with educational foundations. This is being accomplished by combining theory and practice in an interdisciplinary, team-oriented environment anchored to a "real-world" production floor. The Greenfield courses are designed to be modular in nature, and thus offer an ideal educational environment for multimedia-based CBI (computer-based instruction) delivery. In its efforts to standardize all of the Greenfield Coalition's CBI development efforts, the coalition's Information Technology Committee set up a methodology to select an authoring software tool which would best serve the coalition's faculty-based, courseware development needs. Today, intra-university coalition development teams made up of professors and students are designing and producing these learning programs using the innovative educational approaches and advanced information delivery techniques offered by multimedia CBI. This paper summarizes this selection process.