2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Strategies to Develop an Online/Hybrid Signals and Systems Course

Presented at Online and Remote Teaching

Background
Online course offerings greatly facilitate the expansion a department’s pool of potential students making them an important asset in an administrator’s enrollment management toolbox. At the same time, the convenience and enhanced access of online courses make them popular with many students. From a faculty perspective, the flexibility in workplace location and time management that is afforded by online courses is a significant employee benefit. All of these positive factors contribute to the persistence and desirability of online courses. Even more so, the past two and a half years have motivated many universities to transition from traditional in-person instruction to mostly virtual instruction. This transition involved developing new approaches to pedagogy as well as student assessment. During this same time period, there has been an unprecedented growth in student usage of online support materials and support services. This paper focuses on how a large mid-Atlantic university is developing a signals and systems course in online, hybrid and in-person modalities.

Purpose
This work describes a case study conducted at a large mid-Atlantic university in a sophomore-level “Signals and Systems” core course in electrical engineering and computer engineering. Over the course of several offerings (from Spring 2021 – Fall 2022) we aim to increase the student response rate to a course-wide survey asking students to self-report their attainment of the course Learning Objectives and to increase the percentage of students who rate their ability to achieve the course Learning Objectives as either “Good” or “Excellent”. This paper describes our efforts toward achieving this aim.

In the Spring 2022 offering of the online/hybrid section of the course, we introduced “student-produced podcasts” to increase student engagement with the course material and course learning objectives. These are introduced in the course through the use of video quizzes [17]. We aim to show that through the introduction of the “student-produced podcasts”, students can increase the extent to which they attain the five Learning Objectives. In addition, we aim to show that the introduction of the “student-produced podcasts” also promotes student engagement, increases broader participation and active learning, and prepares students for their educational journey for “just-in-time training” and future professional development.

Willingness of the student populations to provide online course-end feedback is viewed as a potential indicator of increased engagement in the courses in response to these introduced interventions. We are pleased to report preliminary results that show that the percentage of students who respond to the online course-end student survey increased from 38% in Spring 2021, to 45% in Fall 2021, and to 54% in Spring 2022 offerings of the course.

Authors

Dr. Mary Yvonne Lanzerotti http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7802-1117 Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University [biography]

Dr. Lanzerotti is a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. She has conducted research presented at 2017 ASEE on learner-centered teaching techniques in her classes at Air Force Institute of Technology, where she was an Associate Professor of Computer Engineering. She has also held positions at the United States Military Academy and at IBM at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where she was Instruction Fetch Unit Integrator of the POWER4 microprocessor and co-author on the POWER6 introduction paper at ISSCC. She is author or co-author of six patents and 22 technical journal articles. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the American Physical Society, and is a Senior Member of the IEEE. She received her A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard University, M. Phil. from University of Cambridge (U.K.), and her Ph.D. from Cornell University, all in physics. Her primary research interests are electronic warfare and complex signal processing in the RF domain, and hardware security.
Dr. Scott Dunning Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University [biography]

Dr. Scott Dunning is Associate Department Head and Chief of Staff for the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. Prior to that, he served on faculty of the University of Maine where he was the academic dean for the School of Engineering Technology for his last thirteen years.
Prof. R. Michael Buehrer Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University [biography]

Dr. R. Michael Buehrer joined Virginia Tech from Bell Labs as an Assistant Professor with the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2001. He is currently a Professor of Electrical Engineering and is the director of Wireless @ Virgi
Prof. Ahmad Safaai-Jazi Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Dr. Nektaria Tryfona Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University [biography]

Dr. Nektaria Tryfona is a Collegiate Associate Professor at the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She received her B.Eng. and Ph.D in Computer Engineering and Informatics from the Polytechnic School, University of Patras, Greece.
She has extensive experience on building data management and database solutions for large-scale systems in collaboration with industrial and governmental agencies, and academic partners. She has published her work in peer-reviewed international conferences and journals.

Her current research interests include data management, data valuation and AI and engineering education. Her teaching/mentoring activities focus on developing and offering classes in project-based learning environments as well as, advising and mentoring students working in industry-driven problems.

Before joining Virginia Tech, she was tenured Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department, Aalborg University, Denmark, a Senior R&D Engineer in industry and academic research centers in USA and Europe, and the founder and Director of DataLab, George Mason University.
Mr. Jianqiang Zhang Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University [biography]

Mr. Zhang is a Senior Learning Data Analyst at the Technology-enhanced Learning and Online Strategies (TLOS) at Virginia Tech, where he acts as a technical lead for several online teaching & learning platforms, and contributes to the learning data analytics efforts. He earned his Master of Arts in Education with a focus on Instructional Design and Technology (IDT) and is working towards his PhD in IDT, Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics with a focus on English as a Second Language (ESL), Bachelor of Arts in English with a focus on English for Special Purposes (ESP). His professional and academic interest spans accros multiple disciplines, including instructional design, learning analytics, user experience (UX), accessibility, and software/application design & development. Mr. Zhang has presented at regional and international conferences, published in academic journals and served as a volunteer peer reviewer for the Association for Educational Communications & Technology (AECT) conferences.
Dr. Luke Lester Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University [biography]

Luke F. Lester, an IEEE and SPIE Fellow, received the B.S. in Engineering Physics in 1984 and the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1992, both from Cornell University. He joined Virginia Tech in 2013 as the Head of the Bradley Department of Electrical a
Max Mikel-Stites http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4574-1414 Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University [biography]

Max Mikel-Stites is pursuing master's degrees in engineering mechanics and mathematics at Virginia Tech. He studies the biomechanics of hearing in parasitoid flies and is passionate about the physics of Marvel superheroes and scientific communication. His general research interests include biological modeling on both organismal and population scales, biological physics, and agent-based modeling. He graduated with degrees in applied mathematics and physics & astronomy from the University of Rochester.
Dr. Kenneth Reid http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2337-7495 University of Indianapolis [biography]

Kenneth Reid is the Associate Dean and Director of Engineering at the R. B. Annis School of Engineering at the University of Indianapolis. He and his coauthors were awarded the Wickenden award (Journal of Engineering Education, 2014) and Best Paper award, Educational Research and Methods Division (ASEE, 2014). He was awarded an IEEE-USA Professional Achievement Award (2013) for designing the B.S. degree in Engineering Education. He is a co-PI on the “Engineering for Us All” (e4usa) project to develop a high school engineering course “for all”. He is active in engineering within K-12, (Technology Student Association Board of Directors) and has written multiple texts in Engineering, Mathematics and Digital Electronics. He earned a PhD in Engineering Education from Purdue University, is a Senior Member of IEEE, on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Education Society, and a Member of Tau Beta Pi.

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