Effectively Deploying Distance Education (De) Laboratory Components In An Engineering Technology Set Up

The goal of the Department of Technology Systems at East Carolina University is to support the economic development requirements of Eastern North Carolina by creating professionals to meet the general engineering and technology needs of its private and public sectors. The various programs in the department emphasize the application of engineering and technology theories to solve real world problems. For this reason students are engaged in hands-on activities beginning with their first semester and do not wait for several semesters or years to experience real engineering activities. During the last three years tremendous efforts have been made to modify and update the curricula of all the department’s programs. Due to the rapid growth of the department in the last few years, the department has embarked on a mission to include distance education (DE) capabilities in its various courses. To accommodate this, various components of the courses have been devised as stand alone modules woven together through a distributed environment. This helps sustain and strengthen the enrollment of the department by offering lab-centric courses remotely. The model will also minimize the burden of purchasing, support and maintaining lab equipment and will help reallocate excessive resources from face-to-face laboratory instruction. This paper will describe various strategies for integrating a DE lab model into the existing curriculum. The model, which we will call ECU-DE Prototype model, will be realized through leveraging exiting DE resources with the proposed model, creating a scalable DE enrollment model (96, 48 students, etc,), integrating existing college and university computer hardware and software capabilities with the proposed model.