2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Teaching and Learning: Challenges and successes with the First-Year program at the regional campus
The paper presents teaching and learning approaches to offering First-Year Experience at a regional campus of a large midwestern university. Challenges faced by students and faculty will also be presented in this paper along with some guidance and best practices. Many universities invest their resources to explore teaching pedagogies that best fit the needs of their students. Universities that offer programs at regional campuses ensure consistency of the curriculum, however, there are challenges associated with offering programs with different demographics represented at the regional campuses. The purpose of this paper is to: a) present some of the challenges faced by instructors in teaching the first two years of engineering courses, b) share student attitudes and performance in core courses, and c) share some of the best practices adopted by the instructors to ensure rigor and consistency of the coursework at the regional campus.
The curriculum for the two courses covers the fundamental concepts and provides an opportunity for students to explore the applications of circuits in the real world. In a normal learning environment, these courses tend to be difficult due to higher expectations for problem-solving, math, and scientific concepts, and adding external factors such as the pandemic adds more complications. The focus of this research work is to study the first- and second-year engineering courses and present the challenges associated with the delivery of the course content, teaching engineering concepts and applications and laboratory experimentation. This paper also presents an assessment of student attitudes to and their performance in engineering courses. With the learning assessment comes the lessons learned and evaluation of teaching strategies that have been investigated by the instructors to facilitate learning.
The courses are two-credit-hour and introduce problem-solving, analysis techniques, testing, troubleshooting techniques, and teamwork. Teaching strategies include the identification and evaluation of flipped classrooms and active learning to support teaching in various modes, restructuring the content, and utilizing alternative methods to assess course goals will be discussed in this paper. This paper provides an opportunity to learn from the unique experience, develop skills to address the various skill levels of the students at regional campuses, and support students and faculty with a variety of academic needs.