Learning Designs Online was engaged to develop prototype engineering eLearning courseware for Lambton College, Canada’s leading petrochemical engineering school. Lambton’s longterm goal was to create an online university offering college engineering to petrochemical technicians around the world.

LDO created a fully-featured, interactive self-study eLearning program including online tutorials, synchronous professor/student sessions, and robust simulations including fully simulated laboratory. The course explores fundamentals of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics.

The unique simulations let students to explore and easily understand complex concepts such as Dalton’s Laws, Boyle’s Gas Laws, etc. These interactive capabilities give learners a profoundly deeper, more intuitive grasp of these concepts that have befuddled high school and college students for generations.

The interactive labs make it possible students anywhere in the world to conduct complete experiments: making experimental observations—e.g., measuring temperature, pressure, and fluid speed—charting observations, making calculations, and, finally recording all required experimental conclusions. The formal lab write-up is emailed to the professor upon completion.

At the time of its development in 1997, this highly interactive courseware set a new benchmark for learning simulations. To the best of our knowledge, nothing like this courseware’s interactive blend of text, graphics, video and simulations had ever been attempted on the Internet prior this date.