Abstract
The Electronic Business Center (EBC) at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) in Taiwan is an innovative educational resource center sponsored by the Ministry of Education. The philosophy behind establishing EBC is to build an open resource center for online e-business technology learning and knowledge sharing among the academic community, industries and government. A three-tier architecture is carefully planned and developed for EBC operation. Through the architecture, the most-updated resources can be customized and distributed to other users without the limitations of locations and time. The center provides sophisticated technologies, facilities and course materials to support the EBC participants in education, outreach, R&D, and technical transfer. Consolidating the technical infrastructure and outreach strategies, the major accomplishment of the center can be categorized into four tracks. They are in outreach, education, prototype hosting and technology (R&D) transfer. The concrete deliverables include interdisciplinary program planning in e-commerce, online teaching materials and case study design, international workshops, education and training events, construction of web-based resource center, newsletter publications, student project exhibits. In order to enhance the outreach capability, applications of information technology include the video conferencing, ubiquitous computing and intelligent multi-channel call center for higher service quality and efficiency. The critical feature of EBC in e-learning is to provide a collaborative environment that integrates the industry, application service providers and researchers from partner universities to demonstrate an internationalized and industry-oriented training and education platform. In a very cost and time effective way, the objectives of educational resource exchange and distribution are accomplished via the on-line collaborative network.