Development of On-Line Lecture and Preparation Resources for Electrical Engineering Laboratory Courses

The goal of this project is to convert five electrical engineering undergraduate teaching laboratories at our university to a hybrid teaching format to increase student satisfaction with the laboratory experience and promote deeper learning. The face-to-face lectures previously used to prepare students for the associated subsequent laboratory session are being replaced with on-line lecture modules to review the theory for the experiments. In addition, on-line quizzes and/or exercises to confirm student understanding of the laboratory theory are being created; formerly such content mastery was probed using preparation review questions requiring handwritten responses. Application modules consisting of either narrated slide presentations or short videos showing the hands-on aspects of electrical engineering laboratory procedures such as building circuits and properly operating the test and measurement equipment are also being created so that the students know what they should be looking for during their experimental work. The first set of on-line course materials for a sophomore level circuits laboratory was deployed during the 2011 – 2012 academic year with two more junior level laboratories converted in each of the subsequent academic years. Assessment data from surveys, course procedures, and student laboratory preparation is compared to the student performance on similar laboratories administered in the previously used traditional face-to-face lecture format. In addition, these same instruments are used for formative assessment of the on-line features to better tailor the modules to the needs of the students. In this paper, three things will be described. First, the common on-line structure developed for the five laboratories within our university’s course management system will be presented. Second, examples of materials including lectures, quizzes and videos developed for several of the laboratories will be shown. Finally, the formative and summative assessment instruments will be described including how the results of these assessments inform the continuing development of the on-line materials