A Case Study: Are Traditional Face-To-Face Lectures Still Relevant When Teaching Engineering Courses?

Abstract—In this rapidly changing age, with virtually all information available on the Internet including courses, students may not find any reason to physically attend the lectures. In spite of the many benefits the online lectures and materials bring to teaching, this drift from the traditional (norm) face-to-face lectures is also creating further barriers, such as difficulty in communicating and building personal relationships, between students and instructor. In this paper we carry out a study that presents and analyzes factors that motivate students to attend a (1) face-to-face instruction in-class versus an (2) online class. This study is based on an anonymous and voluntary survey that was conducted in the School of Engineering at University of Victoria, BC, Canada. This paper presents and shares the detailed results and analysis of this survey that also includes some interesting and useful comments from the students. Based on the results, analysis and comments the paper suggests methodologies of how to improve face-to-face in-class instructions to make them more relevant to the current global information age. Index Terms—Engineering education; global information age; e-learning; students ' motivation; face-to-face classes; online classes; case-study I