Preface

For many decades education in the form of courses by correspondence or TV has been an interesting alternative for those who do not have enough free time to study, or for those who live far from a school, or those unable to attend classes due to some physical or medical restriction. Over the years, many students have benefitted from this way of apprenticeship, developing skills and enhancing expertise in sectors as diverse as health, engineering, human sciences, zoology, and architecture, among others.

With the advent of the Internet the increasing demand of long-distance courses went through a period of fantastic expansion. A specific term was associated with the technology for long-distance education: e-learning.

The term e-learning is associated with all kinds of knowledge transferred by electronic means, with the purpose of teaching or learning. It also includes handling tools which improve the instruction process. Technology development, mainly for telecommunications and computer systems, was a key factor for the interactivity and, thus, for the expansion of e-learning.

In addition to the on-line interaction among students and teachers, the interaction process has brought other benefits such as conferences with multiple users, collaborative work, and the possibility of sharing, sending, and receiving work material (files such as texts, pictures, and programs) in real time. Actually, these technological advances create new challenges such as the need for new methodologies that can explore the full potential of interaction between students and teachers, and the development of new tools which allow the best use of technological resources for learning purposes. This is an excellent opportunity for teachers and practitioners to improve their work.

This book is divided into two parts, presenting some proposals to deal with e-learning challenges, opening up a way of learning about and discussing new methodologies to increase the interaction level of classes and implementing technical tools for helping students to make better use of e-learning resources.

In the first part, the reader may find chapters mentioning the required infrastructure for e-learning models and processes, organizational practices, suggestions,

#### XII Preface

implementation of methods for assessing results, and case studies focused on pedagogical aspects that can be applied generically in different environments. The second part is related to tools that can be adopted by users such as graphical tools for engineering, mobile phone networks, and techniques to build robots, among others. Moreover, part two includes some chapters dedicated specifically to e-learning areas like engineering and architecture.

> **Professor Elvis Pontes, Professor Anderson Silva, Professor Adilson Guelfi and Professor Sérgio Takeo Kofuji** Department of Electrical Engineering Polytechnic School University of São Paulo (USP) Brazil
