A transition from face-to-face to an online delivery, in nano steps

Online learning offers new and unique ways to engage the students. Online learning appeals to a broader set of students. Students who are part-time or prefer more flexible schedules particularly benefit from the online accessibility. As a result, there is a recent trend towards offering online engineering courses in addition to the on-campus experience. Often the challenge when developing an online course is to leverage the unique aspects of online learning and overcome the obvious deficiencies, i.e., face-to-face interaction. A direct digitization of the existing course content likely accentuates the deficiencies. Instead, a systematic developmental approach is recommended to remaster an existing course to better suit its new digital habitat. Here we study such a transformation, detail the steps, and compare the outcomes. A senior engineering elective was selected for the transition into an online course. The course titled, Introduction to Nanotechnology, was previously taught by the same instructor as a face-to-face course. This course was regularly evaluated using student feedback. For the Fall 2018 term, the course was transitioned to be delivered entirely online. It was subsequently offered again during the Summer session in 2019. The student learning outcomes and feedback from two traditional lecture offerings and two digital offerings were compared. The direct measures of course assessments revealed no difference between the traditional and the online offering. The absence of any noticeable difference in learning outcomes is an important baseline for the effectiveness of the online course. The indirect measures based on student surveys reflected a similar endorsement of the online approach. Besides the learning outcomes, the exercise of transforming an existing face-to-face course to online delivery, highlighted: effective transition strategies, assignment types, and engagement methods to build a successful course. This case study proposes a staged transition to test lecture content and assignments within a traditional lecture-based setting. The outcomes of this work provide valuable guiding principles for the engineering education community considering the growing demand for online learning fueled by the generational learning preferences.