Today I started watching the Quality Matters (QM) Quality in Action session on “Designing and Teaching High-Quality Online Engineering Courses.” Andrea Gregg, Daniel Cortes, Robert Kunz, and Tamy Guimaraes from Penn State University were the presenters. Gregg is the Director of Learning Experience Design and Associate Research Professor in mechanical engineering. They had experience designing courses in engineering. Gregg compared the World Campus MS Mechanical Engineering resource and the COE Certified Microcredentials. The team wrote principles to guide their online learning course design. Upon successful completion, participants earn a digital badge. Guimaraes described their ME 422 Principles of Turbomachinery course. This course enrolls fourth year ME students and online degrees. Kunz spoke about the courses the are developing. Kunz described the topics and approach used for their courses. When describing the Computational Fluid Dynamics course, Kunz shared how they built the course. Working with the instructional design team, they developed 15-20 hours of lectures and offline student activity with four weeks of course work. There are fifty five lectures averaging 12-13 minutes each with a video, check your knowledge questions, and downloadable slide deck to follow along. During the last ten minutes of the session, Gregg shared the learner experience from twenty-seven exit interviews from their MS in Mechanical Engineering. Students appreciated the online course feeling like the real classroom. Their biggest challenge was self-management to stay on top of lectures. This is similar to what we found in the online version of the biotechnology lab course. Gregg also asked about pacing and feedback on assignments and received positive feedback.
