Evaluation of online learning in a first-year engineering design course

Abstract

This evidence based practice paper evaluates an online project-based design engineering course. Because of increasing enrollments in engineering courses, class facilities on campus cannot accommodate for additional students. Adding to this problem is that universities may simply not have enough instructors to offer additional course sections to accommodate class growth. Therefore, online learning may be one pathway to address this problem. We examined a first-year engineering course, which consisted of both lecture and lab sections. In this course, students designed, built and tested a remote controlled and an autonomous device over the duration of two quarters. The online course used pre-recorded lectures and covered all theoretical content related to the design project. A traditional/in-person lecture course was simultaneously offered to a separate cohort of students who had attended all lectures in-person. Students from the online and the in-person lecture course both participated in lab sessions, instructed by teaching assistants. We evaluated the online class by student self-assessed surveys to gauge what course features students valued in an experiential-learning engineering design course, and whether a similar learning experience could be provided in comparison to the in-person class. Student performance was also measured by comparing the overall grades between the in-person and online sections.