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Lower-tier colleges and universities in both India and China suffer from passive learning styles. Design and project work is typically absent, the curricula do not focus on problem solving or building project management and communication skills, and there are no internships or other work experience. ”Engineering education is much more theoretically oriented, and students don’t really get this fully blended education that allows them to think outside the box,” says Denis Simon, a professor at the Pennsylvania State University School of International Affairs, who focuses on technology and education in China. ”They haven’t had the interaction with real live engineering that grads here have, so they’re very green when they come into the workplace.”

The main problem, though, is the sheer mass of students enrolled in engineering classes. ”When you have 100 students per teacher, you really can’t get hands-on and be interactive,” he says.

For the last 15 years, to help schools with their nutrition curriculum, the University of North Carolina has offered a series of instruction modules free of charge. Initially delivered by CD-ROM and now online, the program, Nutrition in Medicine, is an interactive multimedia series of courses covering topics like the molecular mechanism of cancer nutrition, pediatric obesity, dietary supplements and nutrition in the elderly.

More recently, Ms. Adams and her colleagues have begun working on online nutrition education programs geared toward practicing physicians.