Relationship of Final Grade and Use of Online Course Materials for an Engineering Economics Course

Ranging from fully online to various hybrid formats, online learning is a significant and growing part of higher education. As online courses grow in availability, there is an increased spectrum of materials and methods used to support the student learning process. However the literature has been slow to develop in examining the effectiveness of various online tools. In particular, undergraduate engineering courses with online components have been seldom studied, perhaps due to the slow adoption of online methods in undergraduate engineering curricula. This paper examines learning tools, how students use them, and how they relate to final course grades in an online engineering economics course. Specifically, it studies student feedback and usage patterns on tools such as instructional videos, online whiteboard sessions, online quizzes and course management system use to determine how that level of use relates to the final grade. Employing data from a well-known online learning management system coupled with a student survey, this study identifies relationships between how often students accessed various learning tools in the course management system (CMS) and how that related to the final course grade. Although correlations between use of various tools and final grade were not large, our data appears to show that students use on line learning tools flexibly to fit their learning styles. Overall use of the tools on the CMS did positively relate to final grade.