A Fully Online Accredited Undergraduate Electrical Engineering Program

We have implemented full online delivery of the undergraduate electrical engineering program at a large public university (Arizona State University). This paper describes the objectives for the program, its implementation and an assessment of student performance. The curriculum, admissions standards, accreditation and faculty delivering the program are identical for face-to-face and online delivery. The program was initially conceived primarily to extend the access to our existing program to more underserved student populations. Our enrolment statistics show that this goal has been achieved to an extent much greater than anticipated. The characteristics of the online students enrolled in online delivery (age, professional experience, veteran/military status etc.) differ from those of the students enrolled face-to-face. Another goal of the program is to develop and instructional approach that leverage the technology of online delivery to fundamentally change how student access the material and organize it according to their individual learning styles. We have developed course materials that are very dense, highly efficient and flexibly delivered. Our approach is completely different from “lecture-capture” approaches to online delivery. Our assessment process shows that there is very little difference in student performance between the face-to-face delivery and online delivery. Significant challenges for our online delivery have been the development of laboratory experiences and the proctoring of exams. Our assessment of student outcomes shows that students enrolled online have achieved the outcomes related to the laboratory exercises. We have engaged an external proctoring company to independently verify and monitor the academic integrity of the online exam process. Another challenge is acceptance of online delivery among our constituencies. This has been achieved to a large extent as verified by the unexpectedly large demand among our students, the willingness of employers to fund tuition and fees, the enthusiastic participation among a growing group of faculty members and discussions of our external advisory board which is dominated by industry members. A recent accreditation visit provides additional evidence of acceptance among the engineering community. Introduction and Brief History: Our online development history has its roots in the MIT open courseware project which published its first course in 2002 and very quickly gained widespread interest among engineering faculty in the US 1 . At our institution faculty began experimenting with both developing their own freely available online materials as well as referring students to MIT open courseware for supplemental materials for their courses. Until 2010 these efforts in our electrical engineering program were individual and not generally coordinated even at the program level. At the institutional level discussions were progressing toward a formal enterprise to provide degree programs online. In 2010 the university launched six degree programs available fully online. The following year Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig at offered an artificial intelligence course at Stanford openly on the web, gathering well more than 100,000 initial enrollees. Andrew Ng subsequently offered a machine learning course with similar interest 2 . These early Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) led Thrun and Ng to found Udacity and Coursera respectively. In 2012, dubbed “The Year of MOOC” by the New York Times, these companies, along with edX, formed by MIT and Harvard, generated unprecedented interest in online delivery of education 3 . This spawned the effort to develop a web-based delivery system for our electrical engineering program at Arizona State University. The initial discussions involved a core of two faculty members, the authors of this paper, and centered on how to leverage technology to provide a student experience better than our existing face-to-face delivery. A second object was to use technology to increase student access to our program. We surveyed the web-delivered education landscape at the time including MOOCs, the open courseware project, our institution’s newly launched online environment (ASU Online) as well as models used by for-profit universities and nontraditional entities such as Kahn Academy. We rejected the MOOC and open courseware approaches because, although they provide tremendous access, they suffer from very poor completion rates and have weak student support structures to help struggling students to succeed 4 . Also important is that they do not normally lead to a degree, nor are they accredited. We believed that delivering providing web-delivery of our entire accredited degree program offered the best match to our goals and our institution. Our next steps were to explore the administrative and accreditation challenges (Stephen Phillips) and to study the strengths and weaknesses of various delivery technologies and their pedagogical implications (Marco Saraniti).