Online automated interactive undergraduate physics course and lab

Abstract

By fully automating all aspects of the learning experience for online courses, a large reduction of education costs can be achieved, while simultaneously matching or improving student performance as compared to human delivered online or traditional lectures. The main elements of an effective fully automated online course or lab are: fully automated content delivery using text-to-speech technology, highly visual course presentation using animated 2D and 3D illustrations that are synchronized with the course delivery, interactive 2D and 3D activities, and automated student assessments. A two semester undergraduate physics course that uses these elements to deliver a fully automated learning experience will be presented in this paper. The course can significantly decrease the cost of learning, while improving accessibility, quality, and uniformity of instruction. The course has a virtual reality physics lab with physics-based modeling of the relevant underlying principles and a variety of interactive physics experiments. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.