A Comparison between Mixed-Mode and Face-to-Face Instructional Delivery Approaches for Engineering Analysis: Statics.

In recent years, the majority of engineering colleges and universities have been experiencing a vertiginous growth in the number of student applications and enrollment. Even though this tendency is very encouraging from the point of view of producing more engineers to satisfy the nation’s demand, it also comes with serious drawbacks. Such growth in the student population requires increasing the number and size of the courses, adding parking spaces, and other facilities. Building new physical facilities is costly and takes considerable time. Some of these issues may be alleviated by offering Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), however this approach is not feasible for some engineering courses. Another alternative that has been explored is the mixed-mode courses. This approach reduces the face-to-face time and use of physical plant by at least 50%. Traditionally mixed-mode courses use a “flipped” modality, placing the majority of the teaching/learning responsibilities on the students and meeting with the instructor only for practicing problems. This paper presents the analysis of a mixed-mode approach, developed by the authors, for a Statics course. The online portion (~50%), conveyed via Canvas Learning Management System (LMS), contains video lectures, study-sets, self-assessment, hands-on homework, e-homework, proctored quizzes, and exams. The face-to-face component (~50%) includes concepts clarification, pre-class assessments, learning activities, real-life applications, problem solving, group quizzes, and discussions. Quantitative analysis of the results regarding students learning and class success are presented and compared with other purely face-to-face Static courses taught by the same instructor. Students’ perception of instruction and opinions are analyzed and presented as well.