Teaching reliability engineering to working engineers

The paper presents the components and design philosophy used to develop a graduate-level reliability engineering course, EE 497, that is currently being delivered to students at a distance. CD based lectures with Mathematica(R) interactive tutorials and online discussions are interwoven to provide students with a rich environment for learning the complex concepts and procedures common to reliability engineering. Material relevance is reinforced with Web links and Internet search activities. Statistical properties and distributions are demonstrated and made tractable through a set of Mathematica(R) tutorials. In these activities, students interactively vary statistical parameters to see their effect, thus developing a thorough understanding of the concepts. Finally, a FirstClass(R) environment is used as an asynchronous classroom and information exchange center where students may interact with their professor and peers