Traditional, Blended, and On-Line Teaching of Electrical Machinery Course

With an increasing emphasis on student learning outcomes and assessment, educators constantly seek ways to effectively integrate theory and hands-on practices in inventive course design methodologies. Critics of engineering education argue that educational programs focus too much on the transmittal of information through static lecture-discussion formats and routine use of outdated laboratory exercises. On the other hand, active learning, learning that involves hands-on experience, significantly improves student comprehension and proficiency. It is clear that understanding and retention are greatly enhanced when students engage in active learning. While theoretical knowledge remains a fundamental component of any comprehension process, the underpinnings of proficiency development seem to increase best through active learning practices. What remains less clear is the “gold standard” for pedagogical approaches that combine theory and hands-on learning. In this article we describe the development and implementation of three models of Electrical Machinery course offering: traditional, on-line, and blended. The traditional way of teaching of Electrical machinery course in Electrical Engineering Technology (EET) and Mechanical Engineering Technology (MET) majors has been conducted for years and therefore provides us with significant statistics on students' comprehension of the subject. The goal of a blended approach is to join the best aspects of both face-to-face and online instruction: classroom time can be used to engage students in advanced learning experiences, while the online portion of the course can provide students with content at any time of the day allowing for an increase in scheduling flexibility for students. The blended version of Electrical Machinery course has been developed and implemented four times. During the first two offerings the blended approach was slowly introduced to the class to understand the students' perception and to capture any positive and/ or negative changes in the subject comprehension. The last three offerings of the Electrical machinery course taught in the Fall of 2012, 2013 and 2014 had fully integrated blended instructions. Rigorous assessment revealing interesting results has been implemented during the last offerings. The on-line Electrical Machinery course was offered during Track A of summer 2012-14 and is in the book for summer 2015. In this article we discuss the structural details of all three course models, including the theoretical topics and experimental exercises of the course, the technology that has been used for the on-line materials development, implementation of the assessment tools to evaluate the students' progress, and perception of all three models.