Assessing The Effectiveness Of Dual Delivery Mode In An Online Introductory Circuits Analysis Course

A 2008 study released by the US Department of Education indicates that online enrollments are growing at substantially faster rates than overall higher education enrollments (12.9% vs. 1.2%), with over 3.9 million students (or over 20% of all U.S. higher education students) taking at least one online course in the fall of 2007. The study also reveals that among the eight major discipline areas examined, engineering has much lower online representation compared to others. One reason for this slow adoption of online teaching pedagogies in US engineering programs can be attributed to the perception by some engineering faculty and administrators that online courses are not equivalent in content and rigor when compared to the traditional, face-to-face courses. This paper presents the results of a study comparing the performance of on-campus and online students in a sophomore-level Circuits Analysis course in a public two-year institution. In this introductory course for all engineering majors, content is delivered simultaneously to oncampus students and online students (dual delivery mode) using a combination of Tablet PC functionality and Elluminate Live! software that allows synchronous delivery through the Internet, as well as recording and archiving of all classroom lecture sessions. Identical homework sets and tests were given to the two groups, and their performance compared. Results show that there is no statistically significant difference in the levels of performance of the two groups of students. Online students also rated their experience in this online class to be better than other online courses they have previously taken.