Design of Web-based Engineering Courses to Enhance Student Learning

In recent years, many universities are looking for alternatives to in-person teaching.Offering engineering courses in online formats: either fully web-based or hybrid format can be quite challenging.While some students still prefer in-person teaching for engineering courses, there are also significant benefits to online formats.For many universities/programs, it is a way of attracting nontraditional students as well as students from other universities since it generates additional student credit hours, which would not be possible with traditional in-person class.With this in mind, we started offering two engineering courses: one design class at the undergraduate level, and another materials class at the graduate level.Both the courses were offered during the summer semester to attract students who may not be on campus.I was the instructor as well as the developer of the web-based (asynchronous) course.While teaching courses in synchronous format (zoom) during Covid-19 provided some insight into online teaching, moving into asynchronous format required significant additional effort.The web page for the course included recording of videos to convey important information, and supplemental materials with example problems, in addition to presentation slides.This paper provides challenges encountered and strategies adopted to enhance student learning.