Authors

Franco Capaldi and Devin R. Berg

Venue

ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Atlanta, Georgia

Abstract

The use of online educational software has seen tremendous growth over the past decade as institutions strive to provide quality education to a larger number of students of diverse backgrounds. This is evidenced by the proliferation of fully online degree programs that cater to students with limited access to traditional on-campus instructional resources. Additionally, an increasing number of traditional classrooms are using online educational software to supplement standard teaching practices in order to better match the diversity of students’ learning styles without straining limited instructional time and resources1 . This trend signals a disruptive shift in the manner in which education is delivered. Despite this, it has been found that engineering programs have adapted to online educational methods at a significantly lower rate than other discipline areas2 . This may be attributed to the deficiencies of existing online learning systems including 1) constraining student responses to quantities the system explicitly asks for, 2) constraining the way in which students must enter their answers, and 3) an inability to discern the incorrect components of a student’s answer.

A next generation online learning system has been developed at Merrimack College with the goal of revolutionizing online engineering education by “understanding a subject” rather than simply delivering content. The software delivers content in an interactive, three-dimensional environment as shown in Figures 1 and 2. When presented with a problem, student input is not constrained in format or to only the final solution. Students have the ability to enter equations, diagrams, graphs, or text related to any portion of the problem including the solution, intermediate steps, or even extraneous aspects of the problem. These entries are evaluated by the software and feedback is provided regarding the correctness of the entry in the context of the presented problem. This grants the student freedom to explore the problem and receive instantaneous feedback as though they were interacting with the instructor in real-time. A number of studies have found that students provided with immediate feedback when working problems are more actively engaged in the learning process and demonstrate greater retention of the information3,4,5. This feedback can take the form of either standard correct/incorrect responses or an answer-until-correct approach. However, some evidence suggests that the answer-until-correct approach has a more significant impact on information retention6 . Further, the use of immediate feedback in the setting of the online educational software allows the student to experience a learning environment more consistent with that of individual instruction while not requiring the direct input of the instructor.

Links

Publisher: 10.18260/1-2–22337