Assessing and Improving Student Engagement and Motivation in Mechanical Engineering Online Courses

Development of online courses in academia has been on the rise and both educators and students have shown interest in possibilities and affordances peculiar to this platform. It offers time flexibility and allows students to better organize their individual learning process. Despite the promising potentials of online courses, they require additional investment both during the course development and in each offering since they rely heavily on instructional design schemes to optimize the content and material for learning outcomes. Previous studies showed that online courses could have lower student engagement and motivation compared to the face-to-face course settings. However, more investigation is required to assess and improve those two factors, specifically for mechanical engineering (ME) online courses. A study is conducted at The University to assess and improve students’ engagement and motivation for two mechanical engineering courses offered online at the undergraduate level. The paper will describe the development of courses and the tools designed to assess and improve students’ engagement and motivation. The work presents a comparison of two ME online courses and produces actionable results for future improvement of the online courses in a similar context/major. In addition, this work highlights activities such as peer-to-peer interaction and video lectures that students considered beneficial and conducive to their learning experience while mostly reporting online discussion forum and reading assignments as the least helpful. We close the paper by discussing what further strategies could be used to enhance, and leverage student engagement and motivation in online learning settings.