Autonomous learning plays an important role in raising students’ learning effect and innovation ability in university education. An effective e-learning environment is indispensable in autonomous learning. This paper studies a web based e-learning system and examines students’ autonomous learning ability and perceptions of e-learning taking students at University of Jinan in China as an example. In this paper, a web-based e-learning system for engineering graphics course is developed. The characteristics, the design idea and strategies fit for engineering graphics are introduced. The architecture and system composition are discussed. The key technologies and implementation methods of each module of system are described in detail. The students had experiences on the network learning system for two years. The practical application indicates that it can enhance students’ perceptual cognition to the teaching contents, increase their learning interests, develop their learning initiative and make them master the teaching contents more quickly.