Concern has been expressed throughout Europe about the significant deficiencies in the basic mathematical skills of many engineering undergraduates. Mathematics diagnostic tests in the UK, Ireland and Portugal have shown these shortcomings, which provide a challenge to those striving to introduce more innovative educational practices into engineering education, such as projects or real-world problems. Every year, in the Dublin Institute of Technology (Ireland) and the Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Coimbra (Portugal), a diagnostic test is given to incoming first-year students. A comparison showed some potentially interesting differences between these students. In September 2013, a project was undertaken to compare mathematical competencies of incoming engineering students in both countries. A modified diagnostic test was devised and the results were then compared to ascertain if there are common areas of difficulty between students in Ireland and Portugal, or evidence of one group significantly outperforming the other in a particular area.

The role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in education is well recognised – learning environments where the ICT features included are being proposed for many years now. The Web Geometry Laboratory (WGL) innovates in proposing a blended learning, collaborative and adaptive learning Web-environment for geometry. It integrates a well-known dynamic geometry system providing an adaptive environment where face-to-face activities can be combined with computer-mediated activities, in a collaborative or stand-alone, synchronous or asynchronous, classroom or homework way. The WGL collaborative environment allows each student to capitalise on one another's resources and skills. Its adaptive module gives to each teacher the ability to assess the geometric level of each student, allowing the teacher to build the individual profile and/or learning paths. In this paper we begin describing what are the goals that support the development of such an environment, the goals that support our beliefs in the usefulness of such an environment for the teaching and learning of geometry, after which we describe the environment and the case studies already conducted.

The switch to distance and online learning is a central issue for the European Education Area in Higher Education. To help prepare the future of digital education, the academic community of the University of Aveiro (UA, Portugal) has been called to debate learning experiences, to prepare forward-looking training systems, and to share practices. With this framework as a background, this chapter has a double objective: to present a teachers' professional development program designed for the empowerment of digital teaching and learning processes and to report two teaching experiences incorporating the key ideas of the program and designed to serve STEM publics (a professional training course and a pre-service teachers' course). An additional objective is to present a future research proposal within an informal context for STEM students. The study will provide relevant insights regarding e-learning in STEM education at the UA and the impact of transformational strategies on the community.