Electric Circuits Online: Towards a Completely Online Electrical Engineering Curriculum

This paper presents our experiences and results in developing and delivering two core Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) courses with laboratory components completely online using an internet based distance learning delivery system and the Mobile Studio technology and pedagogy. The challenge in offering ECE courses online is the fact they have a very intensive hands-on component, such as design and laboratory experiments, that require students to use expensive laboratory equipment to complete and demonstrate their projects. This implied that until now, institutions offering ECE laboratory courses had to have students attend the laboratory courses on their campuses. Our ECE department is in the process of redesigning and delivering all 200-level and 300-level electrical/electronic engineering core and laboratory courses utilizing unique and innovative distance learning technologies. We successfully developed and delivered two pilot courses, “Electric Circuits”, and “Introduction to Electrical Laboratory” completely online during the summer of 2010. Both courses, and a third course called “Introduction to Digital Design” are currently being offered completely online to students enrolled in our regular ECE program. This paper will present a detailed explanation on how we used the Mobile Studio technology to redesign and offer ECE laboratory experiments that can be conducted by students without using regular laboratory space and equipment. We also present detailed description on how we used the Adobe Connect TM software to allow the students to demonstrate their design and laboratory experiment circuits to the course instructor from a remote location. The results have shown that the students were able to conduct most of the design and laboratory experiments required in the regular courses without the need to be on campus. All the students enrolled in the pilot summer courses successfully completed the two ECE courses and are currently enrolled in the follow-up courses.