Connecting the engineer to the 21st century through virtual teaming

It is becoming widely accepted that the most successful teams for the design, analysis, and manufacturing of engineering systems will be formed from a geographically distributed pool of talent. To prepare for this new reality, universities must begin to develop the appropriate “teaming” skills in their graduates. In an effort to facilitate and foster this new paradigm in teaming, we have utilized the most up-to-date multimedia technologies to enhance both the learning process and the team connectivity in a sequence of undergraduate digital signal processing courses. The results contained within are part of the ongoing efforts of the participants of the Signal Processing Education Consortium (SPEC) to develop new methodologies for the teaching of advanced topics in signal processing to the undergraduate student by taking advantage of the SPEC members’ diverse expertise and by mimicking the increasingly common practice of distributed teaming in industry.