Building a remote collaborative learning course in computational modeling of car crash injury prevention

This paper describes an approach for the design of coursework in crash injury biomechanics based on a remote collaborative learning environment. Virginia Tech and Wake Forest University (VT-WFU) have formed the Center for Injury Biomechanics, a unique partnership, which offers a graduate curriculum in crash injury biomechanics to prepare graduate biomechanics students to address this critical public health issue. A challenge however has been how to integrate students at these two geographically separated organizations. This paper describes our experiences in designing and conduct a highly interactive class which revolved around open-ended design and analysis problems. The result has been a course conducted in the collaborative problem-solving environment characteristic of modern interdisciplinary research organizations distributed across geographically disparate regions.