Are Online Courses Appropriate for Engineering Classes?

Many people in higher education are looking to online courses to ease a space and time crunch.But what kind of courses can be adequately taught online?Can a quantitative engineering course be taught successfully online and if so, what is the best format?In order to provide insight into these questions, I have developed and taught an online Statics course for engineering, construction management, and architecture majors.After offering this course and a face-to-face version simultaneously, I have found that there are significant advantages to an online course that a traditional face-to-face course does not enjoy.In fact, the online offering has been more successful than the face-to-face for some students because of the ease in appealing to different learning styles.In addition, lessons learned through developing an online course have been applied to enhance the face-to-face course.