A Master’s degree in acoustics online: The acoustics distance education program at Penn State

In 1987, the Graduate Program in Acoustics at Penn State offered its first distance education (DE) graduate-level acoustics course via satellite TV to a group of 45 students at the Naval Undersea Warfare Engineering Station (NUWES) in Keyport, WA. Since that first live broadcast in 1987 the methods of course delivery have changed drastically, from one-way satellite TV to Zoom broadcasts from a hybrid multimedia classroom. Our student population has grown from 45 students at one location to more than 100 mostly non-military students each semester from locations and companies across the U.S. and around the world. To date, the program has awarded nearly 300 M.Eng. degrees in Acoustics to students from a wide variety of backgrounds. This talk will describe the acoustics DE program in detail, including highlights from the DE program’s history, technological challenges for course content delivery, the divergence of student demographics, methods of instruction and delivery to a combined hybrid enrollment of both resident and remote students, the current curriculum for the M.Eng. degree, including a new offering of certificates, and plans for the future.