Integrating Online Instructional Tools in a Large Engineering Course: An Exploratory Study

During the past two years a Mechanics of Material course was offered with two enrollment options for lectures: a) face-to-face attendance in classroom; and b) online participation, either live or delayed (recorded) via streamed recorded lectures.Two online instructional tools were introduced to support the described format of this course.First tool, the Webex 11 online conferencing tool was used for the synchronous online delivery of the lectures as alternative to the face-to-face participation in the course.The second tool, called MecMovies 7 was an online environment that combines worked examples, drill exercises, and assignment problems to be solved by the students.This paper presents the results of a longitudinal study that followed two consecutive semesters, Spring Semester of 2006-2007 and respectively Fall Semester of 2007-2008.Due to the novelty of this approach for both the instructor and students, the overall research questions were exploratory: How did the inclusion of the two online instructional tools impact students' attitude and behavior?How did these changes impact students' classroom performance?The findings of these studies suggest that students in this type of environment are attracted by the flexibility and convenience of online learning.Anyway, most of students tend to overestimate their ability to self-regulate their own learning process so that they became effective learners.Making students aware of this trap by providing them with empirical findings proved to be a first step in closing the gap between the performance outcomes of the two extreme attendance groups, mainly faceto-face and respectively mainly taped lectures.