Virtual Laboratories for Projects in Environment-Water

Abstract

Modern information and communication technology (ICT) enables new technical solutions to support collaboration in environmental engineering over distance. The establishment of ‘virtual laboratories’ including application of Internet based project platforms, distributed team work and collaboration methods require new kinds of soft skills, knowledge and experience and a new 'technological culture' to be generated just by doing a task for education, training and profession in Hydro-Informatics. This is a challenge for the European dimension, where in future experts and engineers from different countries with different languages, different mentalities as well as different specialization and professional experience have to collaborate in research, teaching and practice. Training of collaborating in such new environment is the challenge of the courses HydroWeb and HydroEurope which by collaboration of 23 universities world-wide will help to establish common high quality university teaching courses and establish links between students from the involved countries. The students are solving a given environmental engineering task in distributed teams in the Internet. The students acquired in this course experience in interdisciplinary team work, net based project co-ordination and Web based reporting. They strengthened their social competence to collaborate in heterogeneous teams with members of different habits, nationalities, ages, educational backgrounds. The described experiment might be the basis to introduce Web based collaborative engineering in the regular course programme of water-environment related curricula at universities.