DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF NATIONAL ENGINEERING-EDUCATION DELIVERY SYSTEM (NEEDS)

Educational course material is constantly being developed by professor s. More and more of this course material is now on computers. It is of ten desirable for this material to be available through computer netwo rks to the widest possible audience. Given a general audience, this ac cess should be quick and simple. The National Engineering Delivery Sys tem (NEEDS) is a new courseware development and distributed system whi ch allows faculty, students, industry and other users to easily access a large number of diverse courseware modules in an effective and effi cient manner. This paper documents the design and implementation of a system that may make this idea a reality. The work includes the develo pment of databases used to store course material information, the desi gn of an efficient communication networking protocol for delivering co urseware modules, and the development of user front-ends for general a ccess to the course material stored in the databases.