Ecole Centrale de Pékin - BeiHang Sino-French Engineer School is an innovative engineer full training program. Five high level engineering institutions in France, the Ecoles Centrales - Centrale Graduate School group, have developed a cooperation in 2005 with one of the best engineering universities in China, BeiHang University (BUAA). The aim of the program is to train every year more than 100 among the best Chinese students. The curriculum, taking place entirely in Ecole Centrale de Pékin, is 6 years long and involves companies as well as research labs in an international framework. In 2008, after 3 years of functioning, around 340 students are already under training.

All the pedagogy developed is based on the French model enhanced to suit the Chinese environment. During the first 3 years, students learn intensively the French and English languages and attend intensive Maths and Sciences courses, half in French, half in Chinese. The last 3 years, based upon the Centrale group engineering Master program, incorporate a multidisciplinary training in engineering sciences, fundamental sciences and social and human sciences, with a one year area of concentration at the end. Teachers and researchers are organized in Sino-French teams, each side learning from the other.

In such a context, an e-learning system for the school has been elaborated in 2007-2008, using the Learning Management System Claroline as a support. This system, in addition to the basic use of making accessible teaching contents and evaluations of students, serves to-day two pilot projects. The first one is a language and culture self-learning system, designed to enhance the students' autonomy. It enables the first 3 years students to improve their French language and culture knowledge. This aims at compensating for a lack of immersion due to the allophone environment in which the learning takes place. The other one is a collaborative work on a scientific subject, which has been implemented in 2008 and concerns the third year students. The objective of this project is essentially to give students methodological skills in team and project work.

Furthermore such a Management System allows supervisors (professors, experts and professionals from companies), including the « remote » ones, to exchange with individuals or groups of students. Project work or team based training work will be proposed in 2009 to the students. They will use the system as a platform for exchanging information or storing data. Supervisors will follow on-line the progress of each group, provide help and evaluate them. As bi-national research projects (especially PhDs) will be developed in the future, the system will also be used as a tool for cooperative work.

In a short future, e-teaching or tutoring may be developed further with the use of video conference media tools. Additionally, at last, considering that the Ecole Centrale de Pékin program will promote international exchanges between French and Chinese students, the use of ICT will allow them to keep in touch with their university of origin.