Comparing an Online vs. On-ground Undergraduate Engineering Courses in Dynamics

Now over one trillion dollars, outstanding student loan debt has ballooned by more than 400% in the past decade while credit card debt only grew 25%.State and Federal legislators' scrutiny of this significant increase in student debt has focused attention on time-to-graduation for both freshman starts and transfer students, increasing the total number of graduates and operational efficiency of undergraduate instruction.Transfer students in engineering have unique issues related to time-to-graduation since they are often missing one or two key prerequisite courses.To increase contact between students and engineering faculty, several key technical courses have moved to the sophomore year.Often, these courses serve as the key initial links for a sequence of required advanced courses, but are rarely offered at the community college level.As a result, many transfer students cannot follow the normal progression of junior level courses which puts them at high risk for taking more than 2 additional years to graduate, further increasing the debt load upon graduation.This paper describes the results of an experiment designed to help quantify one option that can be used to improve this situation for transfer students -online summer offerings of key prerequisite courses.The course selected for this experiment was Dynamics which is a prerequisite for many junior level classes and is not offered at most community colleges.The course was taught in a 100% online format and a separate section was taught in a traditional on-ground format in the summer of 2014.To control the experiment, both of these courses were taught at the same time by the same faculty member and all assignments were the same including the final examination.To further ensure comparability of the student's scores, online students we required to take the final exam live on campus at the same time and in the same room as the on-ground students.While the dropout rate was higher for online students, there was little other difference in course performance.The online students actually had slightly higher average scores of 61.9% on the final examination than the on ground students who averaged 60.5%.These results show promise for the use of online courses in specific situations to help provide options for schools as they continue to focus on improving the operational efficiency of teaching and reducing student loan debt.