WEBLEARNING BOOKS AND ENGINEERING EDUCATION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES ON TEACHING MANUFACTURING PROCESSES

Manufacturing, due to the ability to materialize ideas and concepts, has always been challenging to designers and engineers as it allows fulfilling their creative processes. These technologies are currently undergoing major transformations because the science and materials world keeps demanding solutions of ever increasing complexity, associated not only to the emergence of new materials, but also due to the market’s need to deliver higher quality products for lower costs. Furthermore, designers and engineers have recently begun exploring "bottom-up" approaches for manufacturing instead of the traditional “top-down” approaches due to today's highly complex products, aiming both to improve process efficiency and product quality.

Teaching manufacturing aims to present students with fundamental notions and state-of-the-art technologies, as well as current and future evolutions of new and efficient processes. Considering the ever evolving technologies being developed both by academia and market, currently published manufacturing handbooks cannot keep track to the latest evolutions and trends of the manufacturing world. Even though fundamental knowledge can be systematized in regular handbooks, associated technology keeps evolving in an ever increasing speed and scope. Thus, the ability to produce teaching aids merging traditional paper-based handbooks with online continuously updated literature challenged the author do develop the Weblearning Books (WLB) concept. WLB are fully comprehensive teaching tools, combining traditional physical paper books with digital E-books and an associated online E-learning platform. The digital-based components are continuously updated to keep track with current trends and evolutions, allowing engineering students’ access in a systematic and supervised approach to the latest on the subject. This paper aims to present WLB main structure and features when dedicated to manufacturing teaching to higher education engineering students, showing main challenges and opportunities related to manufacturing teaching and learning.