HydroWeb: ‘WWW based collaborative engineering in hydroscience’—a European education experiment in the Internet

Modern information and communication technology enables new technical solutions to support collaboration in engineering over distance. The application of Web based project platforms and collaboration methods requires new kinds of soft skills, knowledge and experience—a task for education and training in hydroinformatics. This technical note describes a pan-European education experiment, where students from five European universities have solved a given engineering task in distributed teams in the Internet. The collaboration was based on the principle of ‘information sharing’ using a Web based project platform. In this course the students acquired experience in interdisciplinary teamwork, net based project co-ordination and Web based reporting. They strengthened their social competence to collaborate in heterogeneous teams with different habits, nationalities, ages and educational backgrounds. The described experiment might be the basis for introducing Web based collaborative engineering in the regular course programme of water related curricula.