Can Pen Tablets Be Used To Improve The Performance Of Place Bound Engineering Students?

Office hours are an essential component of undergraduate engineering education. In a traditional program, student questions that arise during the completion of assigned work are handled through face to face office hours. Our collaborative electrical engineering program, which allows students to complete their entire four-year degree on site, is taught primarily by on-site faculty and is supplemented through distance education offerings taught via streaming video (SV). We have found that most of our place-bound students, both in distance and face to face offerings, underutilize office hours due to outside constraints. Since most engineering students have a difficult time verbalizing what they are having trouble with, it is difficult for these students to get their remote questions answered adequately without being able to share the same piece of paper. In our SV offerings, we have experimented with web conferencing software to obtain equivalent office hours for distance students and found that this was successful, provided that both the instructor and the student had tablet PCs. Unfortunately the cost of tablet PCs provides a barrier to both students and to academic institutions. In response to this need, a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Project (SoTL) was designed to investigate the use of a relatively inexpensive technology, pen tablets, to improve the access of place-bound students to assistance from instructors and fellow students. Each participating student in the fall section of analog electronics was provided with a pen tablet for the semester and agreed to participate in think-aloud sessions with their instructor. They also were encouraged to use this technology to regularly communicate with their instructor and fellow students. Students were provided with surveys after each thinkaloud session and at the end of the semester. Survey results include their feelings about the technology, their use of the technology, and their thoughts about its future use. Data about student improvement on think-aloud topics and overall class performance is presented.