Large course redesign: Revising an introductory engineering graphics course to move from face-to-face to hybrid instruction

Abstract

In the fall of 2007, faculty in the Department of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education began piloting hybrid or blended instruction in their introductory engineering graphics course. The asynchronous, online components of the course consist of voiced-over content presentations, software demonstrations, and sketching videos. During the weekly face-to-face meetings, faculty highlighted the important concepts for the next lesson, gave brief constraintbased CAD demonstrations, covered ideation and technical sketching techniques, and checked homework. Faculty found that students used a variety of different strategies to complete the textbook material, solid modeling assignments, and sketching assignments. No difference was found between the final exam scores in the hybrid sections and the face-to-face sections. During the fall 2008 semester, faculty conducted another pilot study with a different faculty member teaching two of three hybrid sections. The same methodology was used for presenting the content, SolidWorks demonstrations, and sketching demonstrations. The analysis of midterm exam scores and final course grades revealed no difference between the hybrid and face-to-face sections. Students in the hybrid sections scored significantly higher on the final exam than students in the face-to-face sections. This effort is part of a Large Course Redesign Grant from the university to help convert all sections of the course to hybrid instruction. Key components of the redesign include revising online streaming media, moving online content from WebCT to Moodle, conducting synchronous online help sessions, and developing an automated grading system for constraint-based CAD files. This paper summarizes the previous research conducted in the introductory course, presents data from the fall 2008 semester, and describes the plan for the whole course revision. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2009.