Changes in engineering practices have spawned changes in engineering education and prompted the use of distributed learning environments. A distributed collaborative engineering design (CED) course was designed to engage engineering students in learning about and solving engineering design problems. The CED incorporated an advanced interactive discovery environment (AIDE) that engaged students with different tools to support collaborative engineering design tasks. Data suggested the course design fostered engineering content learning, CED problem solving, collaborative technologies knowledge, and development of collaboration skills. Design recommendations included enhancing instruction with technology-supported collaborative activities, better articulating the value of AIDE tools, and advocating development of competencies with such tools. (Contains 5 tables and 3 figures.)