Traditional, Blended, and On-Line Teaching of Electrical Machinery Course

With a increasing emphasis on student learning outcomes and assessment, educators constantly seek ways to effectively integrate theory and hands-on practices in inventive course design methodologies. Critics of engineering education argue that educational programs focus too much on the transmittal of information through static lecture-discussion formats and routine use of outdated laboratory exercises. On the other hand, that active learning, learning that involves hands-on experience, significantly improves student comprehension and proficiency. It is clear that understanding and retention are greatly enhanced when students engage in active learning. While theoretical knowledge remains a fundamental component of any comprehension process, the underpinnings of proficiency development seem to increase best through active learning practices. What remains less clear is the “gold standard” for pedagogical approaches that combine theory and hands-on learning. The Electrical Engineering Technology (EET) program in the School of Technology at Michigan Technological University is constantly revamping the curriculum to meet the expectations of industry by supplying qualified technicians and technologists who have extensive hands-on experience. To further enhance and make the curriculum model more flexible, all programs across in the School of Technology are developing and offering online courses in multiple disciplines. In this article we emphasize our attention on the development and implementation of three models of Electrical Machinery(EM) course offering. The traditional way of teaching of Electrical machinery course for EET and Mechanical Engineering Technology (MET) majors has already been conducted for several times allowing authors to collect enough statistics for students' comprehension. The goal of a blended approach is to join the best aspects of both faceto-face and online instruction: classroom time can be used to engage students in advanced learning experiences, while the on-line portion of the course can provide students with content at any time of day allowing for an increase in scheduling flexibility for students. A 70/30 hybrid of traditional and on-line version of the in Electrical Machinery course have been implemented three times, which in turn triggered the development of fully on-line and fully blended versions of this course. The on-line Electrical Machinery course was offered in Track A of summer 2012 and the blended version of the course was conducted in the Fall semester of 2012 for the class of 45 students. In this articles we discuss the structural details of all course models, including the theoretical topics and experimental exercises of the course, the technology that has been used for the on-line materials development, implementation of the assessment tools to evaluate the students progress, and students' perception of all three models.