2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

When a program needs to serve students at more than one location, Zoom and other distance learning tools can be used to great advantage. These tools can make it possible to offer courses simultaneously at more than one location, leading to positive changes in course enrollment, retention, faculty workload, and operational efficiency.

At the author’s institution, the Department of Engineering Technology operates primarily from facilities at a satellite campus approximately 10 miles from the main campus. With the entire degree program offered at the satellite campus, the department also offers first and second year major core courses on the other (main) campus. This is done to attract students from that campus to the program, and the department depends on enrollment from both campuses to support upper level core and major concentration courses. After the second year, main campus students have had to shift to the satellite campus. This has a negative impact on retention. More recently, the department has expanded its offerings to include a new concentration offered on the main campus. For students in that concentration, the department needs to offer major core courses at both locations. Many of these courses are more engineering than technology in nature and are currently offered as traditional classroom courses.

To address this need, immediately prior to the COVID pandemic, the author offered a core course in thermodynamics using this technology. With this first effort, the two sections – counted as one class for load purposes - were each in specially-equipped Zoom classrooms. The instructor ran the course from one campus using classroom equipment, and students on the other campus participated using equipment in the other Zoom classroom. Despite the efforts of the distance education staff, this first attempt was not wholly successful due to issues with the classroom equipment. Experience with Zoom during COVID showed that, unlike the setup with the classrooms, Zoom could work quite reliably when run from the instructor’s computer with the students participating using their own computers.

With the return to the classroom, the need to offer courses on both sites remained. Also, the need to bring students from both campuses into a single section remained, both to meet university class size requirements and to have one instructor teach both sections without requiring teaching overloads. Experience gained through several terms and with different courses, including courses teaching computer software, has resulted in a successful model of operation. This paper will share experiences to date and will address benefits in the areas of enrollment, retention, and faculty workload. Assessment and evaluation based on class work will be presented. While this has gone beyond a work in progress to reach a level of successful operation, more development is needed. The paper will also address projected improvements and ways to extend this practice to other courses.