This paper presents a framework for facilitating communication among STEM project teams that are geographically dispersed in synchronous or asynchronous online courses. The framework has been developed to: (a) improve how engineering and technology students and faculty work with collocated and geographically-dispersed teams; and (b) to connect the physical and virtual worlds. The research addresses the distributed network for: (1) conducting research in STEM-team collaboration; (2) creating an open team collaboration infrastructure; and (3) evaluating design prototypes for transferring technologies to commercial developers, application service providers, licensees or manufacturers. As a proof-of-concept and framework assessment, teams of students and faculty developed various design prototypes using "paper" modeling, geometric modeling and visual simulation methodologies. (Contains 2 figures and 1 table.)