A Comparative Analysis of Challenges Encountered in Achieving Student Outcomes When Teaching a Senior Engineering Technical Core Course Online and Face-to-Face

Designing a course that involves problem-based learning for a multidisciplinary senior course is challenging and when the same course is taught online these challenges culminate with new ones added. This comparative analysis improves our understanding of how these challenges impact student learning and provides a basis for evaluating general approaches that are taken to overcome them which can benefit similar course development. The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze the challenges faced in a senior engineering technical core course taught online and face-to-face through different comparisons from various teaching perspectives and between the different teaching methodologies. The first comparison is made in fall 2017 when the course was taught by the same instructor both online and face-to-face. The focus of this comparison is the different challenges for the online vs face-to-face viewed from the same perspective and with using almost the same teaching methodology. The second comparison is made by another instructor for the fall 2018 and fall 2019 with face-to-face classes. The focus of this comparison is the challenges for the face-to-face viewed from the same perspective and with using almost the same teaching methodology. In fall 2019 the course had one face-to-face and two online sections, each taught by a different instructor. Three comparisons are made between each pair. One for the online vs online, and two comparisons for the face-to-face with online. The focus of these three comparisons is the different challenges viewed from the different perspectives of the instructors with their different teaching methodology. A shared rubric is used in all five comparisons. The selected course name for this analysis is Engineering Design and Management with an average of 40 students in each section. The students enrolled in this course are primarily but not limited to mechanical engineering technology and engineering technology management. Challenges start with the formation of group members and the selection of the appropriate design project to suit student's different levels of skills and knowledge and end with documenting and presenting their work. The project engineering design stages include literature review, problem formulation and analysis, project planning, creating design alternatives, evaluating and selecting the best design alternative. During each of the project engineering stages, challenges are compared and analyzed. Project-related challenges were ranked the highest for all comparisons performed. The study also showed that two out of the five student outcomes were harder to achieve and faced higher challenges. When comparing how each of the course evaluation methods helped to reduce the identified challenges towards each student outcome, it was found that the project-related assignments contributed the most in achieving 3 out of 5 student outcomes.