E-learning is the online delivery of information, communication, education, and training. E-learning provides a new set of tools that can add value to all the traditional learning modes-classroom experiences, textbook study, CD-ROM, and traditional computer-based training.
At this moment in the United States, e-learning represents 60% of the training costs. From 2003, 2.3 million American workers will use this teaching method. In France, at present, for 74 large companies, only 8 use e-learning.
The aim of the present paper is to describe what is undertaken in this area by our institution, the ENSAIT (ENSI Arts et Industries Textiles at Roubaix, France).
Since 1889, the everyday question of the ENSAIT is how to train engineers for the textile industry. Obviously, a lot of things have changed since that time: the market, the technologies, the ways for transmitting knowledge, and even the goals, shifting from a "once for life" training toward continuous training.
Moreover, the public concerned by training in engineering schools evolves: more and more foreign students are involved, students come from more diversified origins and need specific and individual pedagogic progression. Well designed e-learning can be a tool to meet the new world learning challenge.
How to learn depends heavily on what to learn and therefore, section 2 provides a short description of our industrial background, the textile industry, and more precisely, the French textile industry. Section 3 describes our institutional background, and more precisely describes what is undertaken at the French Universities' level to build and develop numerical campuses.
Section 4 exposes the Textile Numerical Campus as it is planned by a consortium of learning institutions, among them the Ensait. As it should be, a concluding section and a bibliography are provided.