The move to online: More of the same or re-creating engineering education?

Abstract

The rush to take more courses and more degree programs online continues to rise exponentially. Too often this decision is made in a "Ready, fire, aim!" mode. Institutions decide to "go online" to increase enrollments and revenues but do so too often without seriously considering how course and degree offerings, and their design, align with the institutional mission and strategic goals. When online learning is simply construed as digitally capturing what already happens in a traditional on-campus classroom and streaming that to remote students, institutions fail to capture the exceptional opportunities that online learning provides for creating fundamentally better ways to teach and learn. Those opportunities can reach new, strategically targeted students, increase teaching skills of all involved faculty, and synergistically improve teaching on campus. This paper will explore key strategic opportunities that online learning presents for improving the quality, reach and impact of engineering education, when focus, effort and resources are explicitly committed to doing so, rather than simply getting off-campus students to enroll in existing traditional on-campus offerings. The paper draws largely upon the experiences of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's College of Engineering in developing new distance graduate engineering degree programs. The College has committed to building best-in-class degree programs that grow from centers of strength within the College and which strategically deliver value to the College. This strategic value is derived by creating new, stimulating opportunities for faculty to teach highly experienced engineers, learn with them through challenging authentic project-based learning, and create spillover benefits for faculty on-campus teaching and research. Rightly viewed and applied, online learning creates genuinely new, creative opportunities for teaching and learning, rather than a burden of teaching more of the same. The focus on quality with which UW-Madison College of Engineering has pursued the creation, delivery and support of online learning has been recognized by major national awards for quality from the Sloan Consortium 1, The University Continuing Education Association2, and the American Distance Learning Association3. In January 2012, U.S. News & World Report's firstever ranking of online degree programs rated UW-Madison's online engineering degree programs first in two key categories of proven quality: teaching practices and student engagement; and student services and technology4. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2013.