How the CEPHEI E-course Syllabus Design Was Developed and Implemented

Abstract

While the digitalization of education has been around since the 1990s, it is only since the Covid-19 pandemic that it has really taken hold in education, when universities were forced to rapidly move online and traditional patterns of teaching were no longer viable. This pushed universities to provide a blended learning environment drawing on technologies that our students, as digital natives, had already been using on a daily basis for some time. However, blended learning is only effective if underpinned by tried and tested learning frameworks—something that many universities were not prepared for when the shift to online learning took place. The Cooperative e-learning Platform for Industrial Innovation (CEPHEI) however, was already prepared and ready for this shift, as from 2017 it had been working on the development of an e-learning platform with the aim of digitizing education while also integrating the reality of professional innovation activities into the context of education according to the demands of industry. To achieve this aim, one of the first phases of the project was to identify key learning frameworks for e-course syllabus design, based on existing research, that could be used to provide recommendations for instructors in the development of their CEPHEI courses. This chapter presents the culmination of this process and provides a framework that can be used by instructors or institutions wishing to design e-learning courses. To make these frameworks tangible for the reader, examples are given throughout the chapter from an undergraduate environmental engineering course in a civil engineering department. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.