In response to a comprehensive survey of the needs of industry, the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT proposes an educational initiative that will have fundamental, long-lasting institutional impact at MIT, and more broadly in university engineering education. We are now poised to commit ourselves to making the Conception, Design, Implementation, and Operation (CDIO) of aerospace and related complex high-performance systems the engineering context of the education we provide. With CDIO, we will create a new integrated education, whose goals are: to educate students to master a deep working knowledge of the technical fundamentals; to educate engineers to lead in the creation and operation of new products and systems; and to educate researchers to understand the importance and strategic value of their work. This $21.9 million strategy is part of our effort called CDIO: The Engineering Context of Education. Our vision is to provide students with an education that stresses the fundamentals, within the context of CDIO and focused on real world systems and products. In this way, students will experience an integrated education that ties subjects together, as opposed to a traditional discretization of material. They will learn experientially through a rich offering of team-based design-build-operate projects, both in modern classrooms and a state-of-the-art learning laboratory. Internships will be a key experience for summer students. Finally, we will implement a robust assessment process to continuously study and improve the educational model. The strategy to implement CDIO has four components. First, we must reform our curriculum and pedagogy. Second, we must seek to improve the faculty competence, in order to develop a cadre facile in the skills of modern engineering practice. Third, we must develop a better understanding of technical learning as the basis for this educational improvement. Finally, as a visible symbol of our commitment to this effort, we are building an enabling infrastructure with new meeting, working, and learning spaces - the new Learning Laboratory for Complex Systems. The Learning Laboratory will bring together undergraduate and graduate students from Aero/Astro, other engineering departments, and the Sloan School of Management in an environment that fosters community learning among students, faculty, and industrial partners. This program will change the way we teach. For optimal learning, students need a base of experience upon which they can map new knowledge. By making the Conception-Design-Implementation-Operation of systems and products a hands-on experience, education will be improved in two ways: it will give students a deep working knowledge of the fundamentals; and it will simultaneously educate the students in the system development process. Our students will be building knowledge by creating systems. In order to reform our curriculum and pedagogy, we offer several curricular innovations. The first is the creation of the CDIO syllabus - a detailed listing of the skills and attributes desirable in a young engineer, including appropriate levels of proficiency, and the necessary metrics for measuring proficiency. The second is a set of educational links within the curriculum to reinforce learning across subject matter. The third fosters the development of team and communication skills by creating experiences in collaborative design. A multi-year, team-based capstone design experience will span the product development process, from need definition and requirements analysis, to design, construction, testing, and operation of real hardware and software prototypes of complex aerospace systems. MIT as an institution, and our Department as a faculty, form a community committed to develop, implement, and assess this effort. CDIO is consistent with the vision of MIT President Charles Vest, supported by the administration and trustees, and approved by unanimous vote of our faculty. MIT has pledged $8.3 million of the construction and renovation costs for the Learning Laboratory for Complex Systems. To succeed in this major reform, we must build an alliance with world-class companies to help govern this enterprise-both in the conducting of the educational experiments, and in the evaluation and feedback that will guide us through the endeavor. It is our belief that Microsoft's partnership in this program will ensure its success, while providing quantifiable benefits to Microsoft. These benefits include: influencing the way engineering students are educated; defining and creating a new generation of world-class engineers; gaining preferred access to MIT students for internships, co-ops, and permanent employment; achieving higher visibility on the MIT campus; and developing a closer working relationship with MIT faculty. There is every reason to believe that the proposed effort will create young professionals who meet Microsoft's corporate needs, and who are ready to engineer the future. The proposed educational initiative of particular interest to Microsoft is the experimental use of distance collaboration in design courses. The goal would be to implement and trial desktop video conferencing as a tool for teaching, designing, and communicating between remote locations in a common design effort. Specifically, there would be two types of activities piloted next spring. In the first, we would have collaboration "into" MIT by several experts arround the country. These experts would work with students in our undergraduate courses on system design. In the second, the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics would link its graduate spacecraft design course with a parallel course at the one of several peer engineering departments (Cal Tech or University of Colorado are leading candidates). Elements of this educational experiment to be tested would include: Remote education of common course material (distance lecture) Use of desktop sharing for formal design (distance design collaboration and file sharing) Use of desktop videoconferencing for communication during the design process (distance communication) It is believed that this type of design experience, intertwined with the use of information technology, will expose students to the realities of system design and development faced by modern-day engineers who can be located in different building, cities, and even countries. Students will learn to work and communicate in a design environment constrained by scheduling, time zones, and differences in culture.