Educational Innovation in the Design of an Online Nuclear Engineering Curriculum

The purpose of this paper is to describe the develo pment and implementation phases of online graduate nuclear engineering courses that ar e part of the Graduate Nuclear Engineering Certificate program at Virginia Tech. Virgi nia Tech restarted its nuclear engineering program in the Fall of 2007 with 60 student s, and by 2009, the enrollment had grown to three times its initial size. In this pape r, we present the innovative ways we employed to differentiate the program from other prog rams nationwide. Starting in 2009, with education grants from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), we began transforming the distance courses from video conferencin g to an online format that uses asynchronous and synchronous technologies. We used design principles drawn from research and theories in disciplines such as adult learning, cognitive science, motivation, and education. During these phases we worked closely with the distance learning institute at Virginia Tech which employs a structured life cycle me thodology for online course development. We discuss the instructional design approac hes used to provide a meaningful learning experience for adults, particularly non-tr aditional students. In addition we examined observational data to indicate instances for e xperiential learning.

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