Work-in-progress: Collaborative platform for systems engineering: Active learning to train engineer students through projects

Collaborative Platform for Systems Engineering is a project funded by the French National Agency for Research under “Investments for the future” program. PLACIS is the French acronym for this project and this is the official name of this project. It started in September 2012 and is managed by the Collegium Ile-de-France (composed of three engineering schools). This large-scale project promotes active learning and teaching through industrial, international and at-a-distance collaborative projects, carried out by engineer students. Since its beginning, it has gained in maturity: new students´ projects, new partners, but also development of new tools like a future learning platform: a distributed learning environment adaptive, collaborative, semantic and social web 3.0 and an implementation of a toolbox for teachers to assess skills and knowledge in project-based learning with an Erasmus+ project in parallel. The objective is to develop or create the involvement of teachers and students into new teaching practices (project-based learning, problem-based learning; small private online courses) necessary for the implementation of an alternative to the traditional configuration courses / supervised work / practical classes. All these aspects enable us to see the first achievements of what is the main goal of the project: to train students not only to become classic engineers, but also to be able to understand multidisciplinary and industrial issues, to work in teams, with people from different cultures and, more generally, to be actors of their curricula and to move easily in today´s and tomorrow´s industrial world.