US – TURKEY Workshop On Rapid Technologies, September 24 – 24, 2009 31 Abstract – Online courses and web-based laboratories are getting extremely popular in the 21 st century. Institutional budget constraints and 24/7 accessibility features make the distance-based instructional deliveries very popular. This paper will report the remotely accessible rapid prototyping laboratory-and-online course practices at Tennessee Tech University. The development, implementation, assessment and dissemination efforts of these projects have been accomplished as part of National Science Foundation ATE and CCLI grants. The results of these current studies are presented with feedbacks received from the undergraduate level design and manufacturing students. Keywords – Rapid Prototyping, Distance Learning, Online Courses, STEM, Remote Laboratory I. INTRODUCTION During the Fall 2007 semester, Tennessee Tech University’s Rapid Prototyping course has been re-structured to offer a fully online laboratory component for students’ practice. Students were able to prototype their parts through remotely accessible Rapid Prototyping Laboratory. Web-enhanced RP course students were also able to interact with students in Western Nevada College and prototype joint project parts with the campus-engineering students. TTU students and on-line WNC students have learned the cutting edge RP practices through TTU’s Rapid Prototyping course. In order to successfully accomplish the web-based hands-on laboratory practices and instructional deliveries, many distance course materials have been developed. They are given as follows: 1) Remotely Accessible Rapid Prototyping Laboratory [1], 2) Web-based Instructional Delivery Support Center [2], 3) Desire2Learn Online Course Management Site [3], 4) WebCT Rapid Prototyping Instructional Delivery Site [4], 5) Moodle Open Source Course Management System Site [5], and 6) Rapid Prototyping P16 Information Center [6], Most of the practices given above are also available through the National Science Digital Library [7]. NSDL is a free online library for education and research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics--STEM. The NSDL Program was established by the National Science Foundation in 2000 as a free online library which directs users to exemplary resources for STEM education and research. NSDL provides an organized point of access to STEM content that is aggregated from a variety of other digital libraries, NSF-funded projects, publishers, and NSDL-reviewed web sites. NSDL also provides access to services and tools that enhance the use of this content in a variety of contexts. NSDL is designed primarily for K- 16 educators, but anyone can access NSDL and search the library at no cost, although some content providers require a nominal fee or subscription to retrieve their specific resources. Other than these six resources given above, the materials presented in the 2008 Rapid Prototyping Education Summit available at [8] are accessible via NSDL too. This current paper will only report the first three implementations highlighted before. II. REMOTELY ACCESSIBLE LABORATORY TTU and its project partner, Saddleback College purchased servers, network cameras and various accessories to give Web-based access to their RP facilities. Both sites are password protected and users can access these labs through their internet browsers. Any user can access the labs and virtually see the lab environment and current works going on in the labs. The basic steps for all RP techniques can be summarized as follows:  A CAD model of the target part is constructed, and then converted to an STL file format.  The RP machine processes the STL file by creating sliced layers of the model. Rapid Prototyping-Distance Delivery Tools Ismail Fidan 1 , Birhan Isik 2 1 Tennessee Tech University, Cookeville, Tennessee, USA ifidan@tntech.edu 2 Karabuk University, Karabuk, TURKEY bisik@karabuk.edu.tr