Concurrent Offering of Online and Face-to-Face Courses: Synergies and Challenges

With the advent of Master of Engineering degree programs, departments of mechanical engineering have began offering online sections of master’s level courses concurrently with the face-to-face, on-campus sections. This creates significant opportunities and challenges. In this paper, the authors explore these issues through case studies that document their experience with teaching concurrent sections of courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The authors discuss synergies, such as the opportunity for traditional full-time students to interact with off-campus students who mostly are part-time and employed in engineering positions, ways in which online teaching can inform face-to-face teaching, and opportunities to compare the assessment of student learning for online and face-to-face instruction. Some of the challenges include finding ways to engage the online students in similar fashion to the face-to-face students and managing faculty workload if both sections are considered a single assignment. The authors conclude the paper with lessons learned and recommendations for how this type of offering can be made most effective.